Praise for The Prize:
"Jill Bialosky wears several literary hats; she is a respected and admired editor, poet, and memoirist, as well as a novelist, and the many strengths of The Prize reflect that varied experience. It’s a shapely, well-researched book, written with a poet’s clarity of language and a memoirist’s psychological insight. Best of all, it is a work of novelistic imagination with a fine sense of felt life."—The East Hampton Star
"And for someone whose life is built around finding the significance in the smallest of moments—moments which Bialosky captures with such powerful insight—there is much at stake for him to lose. In the end, after betrayals and loss and sadness, Bialosky asks her hero to consider what he holds most dear. Like Edward feels upon discovering a transcendent piece of art, this book finds that little opening at the edge of your soul and seeps in."—Kirkus Starred Review
"[A] luminous behind-the-scenes view of the art world.... One expects a poet’s prose to soar in fiction, and the author does not disappoint, crafting her own work of art with her evocative, fresh descriptions and her careful observations of how artists transform inspiration into their work."—Publishers Weekly
"Bialosky...articulates with grace the crass and the sublime as she explores questions of character, art, obsession, ambition, lies, loneliness, and love. This fluently sophisticated and exquisitely pleasurable novel is radiant with precise and sensuous descriptions and intricately laced with discerning and affecting insights into the passion and business of art and the meaning and struggles of marriage."—Booklist Starred Review
"Accomplished poet and memoirist Jill Bialosky puts her name on the fiction map with her understated novel The Prize... An acclaimed poet with four collections under her belt, Bialosky favors a streamlined vocabulary, each word imbued with clarity and weight. It serves the themes — of the disparity between soulful art and the soulless art world, of the ease with which our time-honored values can be toppled by an event, or a person, or the pursuit of a prize — very well. The Prize is a subdued but haunting investigation of the ways in which modern exigencies can so easily overthrow beauty, purity, and what we believed to be everlasting." —Bustle
"The Prize is a subtle, incisive, and erotically charged exploration of the dark crossroad where art, money, and obsession converge. Jill Bialosky has written a true and dangerous novel." —John Banville, author of The Sea
“Jill Bialosky brings a poet’s ear for language to this moving, knowing meditation on marriage and art and the emotional costs of a life spent in pursuit of even the worthiest ideals.” —Jonathan Dee, author of The Privileges, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“In The Prize, Jill Bialosky has written an erotically charged story about the contemporary art world suggestive of a Roman a clef, but far more sponsored by a sublime and sympathetic narrative imagination and boldness. The character of Agnes —a brilliant artist— is a deliciously maddening figure who makes Machiavellian strategies of ambition seem like child's play. Impressively, many of Bialosky's people can't seem to stop apprenticing themselves to their worst instincts (to quote Chekhov) and how they reconfigure their lives to fit their delusions of grandeur makes for hypnotic betrayals. The Prize is vividly modern, and in the tensions offered between art and life, timeless. Yet finally, Bialosky's novel is a kind of old-fashioned love story, with an ending whose bittersweetness is powerfully earned.” —Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
“Jill Bialosky has written a haunting novel about the gulf between art and the art world – the place where deals are made and souls are lost – but more, about the cost of our choices, our failures, and our silences. Wintry, subtle, unnerving and mysterious in its impact, this book drew me in deeply and really got to me.” —Joan Wickersham, author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a Finalist for the National Book Award
“A compulsively readable novel about art: both that on the canvas, and that of finding one's home in another.”—Elizabeth Berg, author of Open House
"Renowned poet Jill Bialosky has once again turned her penetrating eye to fiction and lucky for us, because here she delves deeply into nothing less then the complexities of art and desire, and their often dangerous interaction with commerce. At its heart, her wonderful new work, The Prize, is tense, romantic, and timely; a novel about passion and betrayal." —Helen Schulman, author of This Beautiful Life
Praise for History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life:
*A New York Times Bestseller
*Entertainment Weekly’s best nonfiction works of 2011
*Elle Magazine, Elle Lettres Readers' Prize, February 2011
“A searing elegy… This memoir reads like butter and cuts like a knife.” —People (FOUR Stars)
“Illuminating.”—USA Today
“Eloquent, harrowing and wise, this memoir is brave and necessary, and a gift for anyone who has lost a friend or family member to suicide. ”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Tender, absorbing, and deeply moving….Bialosky writes so gracefully and bravely that what you’re left with in the end is an overwhelming sense of love.”—Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A).
“Elegiac… Affecting.”—The New Yorker
“Bialosky’s language is plain but enveloping… Extraordinarily useful... a source of solace and understanding. [Bialosky’s] hand is always skillful, as attentive to the rhythms of storytelling as to conveying emotion. … The best memoirs of life and tragedy teach us universal truths.”—Time
“Valiant and eloquent…Bialosky’s thoughtful book elucidates the complexity of suicide.” ¬¬—Washington Post Book World
“A profound and lyrical investigation…Bialosky writes sensitively and beautifully.” ¬¬—New York Magazine
“Brave and beautifully crafted.”—The Daily Beast
“History of a Suicide is beautiful and sad and more than its title would have you believe. It is the story of all grief, the kind of history that can teach us—all of us —about what it means to be a thinking, feeling human being. A book, in other words, that will teach you how to live.” —Darin Strauss
“In her lovely, moving exploration of family, sisterhood and suicide, Jill Bialosky has written an extraordinary story which brings her sister Kim to life and also serves as a practical road map to understanding why life can become unbearable for someone who seems extravagantly gifted. Bialosky’s powerful prose evokes the lives of her sisters and her mother to paint a vivid portrait of what it means to be a woman—a woman searching for the right man, a woman in a family of women. Readers will find solace and clarity in this wonderful book.” —Susan Cheever
“The plain language of Bialosky’s title reflects this book’s quiet, intimate and profoundly understated art: a clear medium penetrating into the wounded and wounding mystery of her subject.”—Robert Pinsky
“This is that rare book that is so articulate and stunningly close to the bone that one holds his or her breath while reading it. Written with a poet’s eye and a novelist’s gift, History of a Suicide takes the reader along on her deeply personal journey, giving much needed language to the emotional devastation of ‘surviving’ a suicide... The result is an amazingly intimate memoir—a must read for anyone who has suffered profound loss, survived family trauma and all too well knows the associated feelings of guilt, complicity, and rage.”—A.M. Homes
“Jill Bialosky has stared straight into the white hot heart of something so painful, so very-nearly unspeakable, and in doing so, has illuminated it—both for herself, and for ourselves. I think this book will resonate powerfully for many readers. I can’t tell you how many times I caught my breath, how many times I cried.”—Dani Shapiro
“Like a match in the darkness, Jill Bialosky’s stirring memoir sheds light on the fathomless mystery of suicide. This intimate, brave book is a testament not only to the devastation of loss, but to the redeeming power of love, memory, and art.”—Melanie Thernstrom
“Jill Bialosky is such a fearless and clear-eyed and compassionate writer that although we know from the start how the story she tells will turn out, we cannot stop reading. By bringing her sister so vividly to life on these pages, she performs a great service. As much as anything else I've read, this book dispels the comforting and pernicious myth by which we keep the subject at a distance: that suicide happens only in other people’s families.”—George Howe Colt, author of November of the Soul
“Could things have been different? That is the inevitable, haunting question after a suicide. It can never be answered, only explored; and Jill Bialosky explores it with intelligence, integrity, a poet’s sensitivity, and a sister’s enduring love.”—Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index
“Better than anything on the shelf on the subject today, this powerful, honest, deeply personal testimony opens a conversation that is long overdue and restores the loving remembrance of those dead by their own hand to the place it deserves among the living. It honors a darling sister’s struggle and her memory at the same time it bears witness to the odyssey of grief Bialosky and her family endured. This willingness to play in the deep end of the existential pool is so rare a gift: that Bialosky juxtaposes the chronicle of Kim’s death with the challenges of becoming a mother is the stuff of metaphor and narrative we more often find in poetry. It is brave, ambitious and entirely accomplished.”—Thomas Lynch, National Book Award finalist and author of The Undertaking
“By turns a mystery story, a psychological profile, a memoir, a literary and social critique, Bialosky writes about despair with such elegance and perspicacity that the reader, paradoxically, is returned to hope, page after gleaming page.”—Lauren Slater, author of Prozac Diary
“Moments of exquisite pain and surprising joy.”—O, The Oprah Magazine, 10 Titles to Pick Up Now
“...Extraordinarily valiant and resonant testimony to the healing powers of truth and empathy.”—Booklist
“The writer is not simply in control of the words on the page but is in dear possession of the work, tending a poetic/narrative/intellectual valve for regulating intensity.”—The East Hampton Star
“A poignant and resonant memoir.”—Cleaveland.com
“A beautifully composed, deeply reflective work.”—Publishers Weekly
“In quietly piercing language, [Bialosky] delivers a sure sense of a “beautiful girl” who took her own life at age 21 and of what it means to grieve such a death, burdened with an awful sense of responsibility that can’t easily be shared with others.”—Library Journal
Selected Praise for The Life Room
* A Chicago Tribune Favorite book of 2007
“A lovely, genuine, deep work of art.”—Colum McCann
“A stunningly generous and finely crafted novel.”—Howard Norman
“Like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours echoing Mrs. Dalloway, Jill Bialosky’s new novel has a literary ghost rattling around in its walls. Anna Karenina haunts The Life Room. Instead of a single Vronsky, Eleanor faces several. Her resolute self-destruction, with love the prime weapon, gives this novel the feel of an on-coming train.”—Los Angeles Times
“A suspenseful tale…with a kind of reckless illogic that would do Tolstoy proud.”—The New York Times Book Review
“…adept at capturing the banality of desire and the patterns of contemporary life…”—The New Yorker
“Eleanor Cahn is of two minds about her impending trip to Paris, the event that kicks off poet and editor Jill Bialosky’s introspective second novel…Eleanor’s quest is the search for her lost passion and [Bialosky’s] poet’s gift for language is up to the task.”—Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2007
Selected Praise for House Under Snow
*A Barnes & Noble Discover Pick
“Such lyrical heartache awaits the reader in this lovely first novel. Here is a poignant page-turner that reminds us of the enormity of our first love, and reveals to us along the way—with a sharp and compassionate eye—the desperation of mothers and daughters and men.”—Elizabeth Strout
“A passionate, sensually written tale of a daughter’s struggle to wrest free of her mother’s fitful and destructive influence.”—Jennifer Egan
“This artful first novel by the poet and editor Jill Bialosky is a quiet stepsister to Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm.” –The New York Times Book Review
“A well-wrought first novel.”—The Washington Post Book World
“An elegiac novel of a father’s sudden death and its lingering effect on the family he leaves behind.”—The Washington Post
“A lucid, finely crafted first novel…captures the purity and desperation of adolescent love in thick, sensual descriptions tinged by the wisdom of distance.”—Los Angeles Times
