Background
Andrea Barrett was born on July 17 in 1965. She is a daughter of Walter Barrett and Jacquelyn Knifong.
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- Works
book
Ship Fever: Stories
(1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction. The elegant ...)
1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction. The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, "science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material" (Boston Globe).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393316009/?tag=2022091-20
1996
Lucid Stars
(Penny Webb falls in love with Benjamin Day, but when thei...)
Penny Webb falls in love with Benjamin Day, but when their marriage fails, Penny must adjust to a new kind of family life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385319436/?tag=2022091-20
1997
The Voyage of the Narwhal: A Novel
(Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration_...)
Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration_the mid-nineteenth century romance with the Arctic_Andrea Barrett's compelling novel tells the story of a fateful expedition. Through the eyes of the ship's scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells, we encounter the Narwhal's crew, its commander, and the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we meet the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery, finally discovering what they had not sought, the secrets of their own hearts. 16 steel engravings and one map.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393319504/?tag=2022091-20
1999
The Air We Breathe: A Novel
("An evocative panorama of America...on the cusp of enormo...)
"An evocative panorama of America...on the cusp of enormous change" (Newsday) by the National Book Award-winning author of Ship Fever. In the fall of 1916, America prepares for war―but in the community of Tamarack Lake, the focus is on the sick. Wealthy tubercular patients live in private cure cottages; charity patients, mainly immigrants, fill the large public sanatorium. Prisoners of routine, they take solace in gossip, rumor, and―sometimes―secret attachments. But when the well-meaning efforts of one enterprising patient lead to a tragic accident and a terrible betrayal, the war comes home, bringing with it a surge of anti-immigrant prejudice and vigilante sentiment.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393333078/?tag=2022091-20
2008
Archangel: Fiction
("Andrea Barrett's work stands out for its sheer intellige...)
"Andrea Barrett's work stands out for its sheer intelligence…The overall effect is quietly dazzling."―New York Times Book Review Winner of the National Book Award for her collection of stories Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has become one of our most admired and beloved writers. In this magnificent new book, she unfolds five pivotal moments in the lives of her characters and in the history of knowledge. During the summer of 1908, twelve-year-old Constantine Boyd is witness to an explosion of home-spun investigation―from experiments with cave-dwelling fish without eyes to scientifically bred crops to motorized bicycles and the flight of an early aeroplane. In 1920, a popular science writer and young widow tries, immediately after the bloodbath of the First World War, to explain the new theory of relativity to an audience (herself included) desperate to believe in an “ether of space” housing spirits of the dead. Half a century earlier, in 1873, a famous biologist struggles to maintain his sense of the hierarchies of nature as Darwin’s new theory of evolution threatens to make him ridiculous in the eyes of a precocious student. The twentieth-century realms of science and war collide in the last two stories, as developments in genetics and X-ray technology that had once held so much promise fail to protect humans―among them, a young American soldier, Constantine Boyd, sent to Archangel, Russia, in 1919―from the failures of governments and from the brutality of war. In these brilliant fictions rich with fact, Barrett explores the thrill and sense of loss that come with scientific progress and the personal passions and impersonal politics that shape all human knowledge.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393348776/?tag=2022091-20
2014
Andrea Barrett
Edit ProfileEducation
She received her education at Union College.
Career
Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties. Barrett's work has been published in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, and The Kenyon Review, among other places.
Barrett teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina. She was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Barrett also teaches at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
Works
book
-
The Voyage of the Narwhal: A Novel
(Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration_...)
1999 -
Lucid Stars
(Penny Webb falls in love with Benjamin Day, but when thei...)
1997 -
Archangel: Fiction
("Andrea Barrett's work stands out for its sheer intellige...)
2014 -
Ship Fever: Stories
(1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction. The elegant ...)
1996 -
The Air We Breathe: A Novel
("An evocative panorama of America...on the cusp of enormo...)
2008
-
The Voyage of the Narwhal: A Novel
