Background
Sayers, Valerie was born on August 8, 1952 in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States. Daughter of Paul and Janet (Hogan) Sayers.
(Sayers's gift for delineating family relationships agains...)
Sayers's gift for delineating family relationships against the microcosm of a small Southern town grows more assured with each novel. This third book to be set in Due East, S.C., focuses on the Irish Catholic Rooney family, outsiders in the community because of their religion. Dolores Rooney's New York origins and her outspoken championing of integration. On the unseasonably warm November day in 1963 during which most of the story takes place, Dolores ruminates over her fifth pregnancy and what it will mean to the family's already shaky finances, and Bill Rooney hopes to sell a prize piece of real estate to help his faltering business, meanwhile thinking bitter thoughts about Dolores's sanctimonious piety and intellectual superiority. Eleven-year-old Kate feels the stirrings of sexuality, and gains some insights from her teenage brothers. And a New York Times reporter whom Dolores brings home to dinner trains a spotlight on their inner lives and sets in motion an event whose implications will reverberate down the years. Then President Kennedy's assassination unites them in terrible grief. Sayers's prose has verve and humor, her view of Southern life is clear-eyed, authentic and generous. Her compassionate understanding of the strains, worries and missed communications of marriage gives this book depth and staying power.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810127261/?tag=2022091-20
(The romance between Franny, a free-wheeling Southern girl...)
The romance between Franny, a free-wheeling Southern girl, and Steward, an obedient trust-fund kid, survives over the years despite her marriage, his success, and miles of separation. By the author of Who Do You Love. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. Tour.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385424256/?tag=2022091-20
(Mary Faith Rapple wonders when her lover will stop making...)
Mary Faith Rapple wonders when her lover will stop making promise he can’t keep—and leave his wife at last. But Mary Faith isn’t the only woman in town with man troubles, for everyone has someone they want, someone they can’t have, and someone they want to forget. Sayers has a gift for voice and the honest, gritty commentary about human behavior. This book offers her own version of the humor that Southern writers from Eudora Welty to Flannery O’Connor to Reynolds Price use so tellingly. Sayers’ novel is a skillful and well-crafted book which should appeal to readers of intelligent fiction.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385243766/?tag=2022091-20
( Mary Faith Rapple is smart, pretty in a rangy, gray-eye...)
Mary Faith Rapple is smart, pretty in a rangy, gray-eyed sort of way—and very definitely pregnant. Not an unusual occurrence in the sleepy town of Due East, South Carolina. But when Mary faith announces that she will have a virgin birth and her father, Jesse Rapple, owner of the Plaid King filling station, vows to uncover the truth, the sparks begin to fly. Spirited, evocative, and utterly delightful, this brilliant novel by Valerie Sayers explores the love and loneliness, the hopes and fears, the unspoken yearnings of the human heart. Due East is a sweet and tender novel. Like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, Sayers writers with compassion of lonely characters whose lives are slightly off center, and her best scenes have a fine sense, sharp edge of irony. Her chosen territory is the human heart.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385236735/?tag=2022091-20
(Off his medication and slowly going mad, Timothy Rooney, ...)
Off his medication and slowly going mad, Timothy Rooney, aging boy wonder of the South Carolina lowlands, heads for New York City to search for Bernadette, an ex-wife from a six-day marriage, and to spend the fifteen thousand dollars he has hidden in his shoes. 12,000 first printing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385473664/?tag=2022091-20
(Franny Starkey has been breaking men’s hears since she wa...)
Franny Starkey has been breaking men’s hears since she was a teenager in Due East, South Carolina. Now a married mother of three, she no longer turns heads the way she used to. Michael, her drug-dependent playwright husband, cannot forget the excitement of their gun-running honeymoon in Ireland. Sayers creates an engaging novel that follows Franny’s path from her early, poverty-ridden days to her hedonistic college life to her longings for an artistic career while changing diapers in a Brooklyn apartment. The constant in her life is Steward Morehouse, a well-to-do nerd from Due East, who loves Franny. When Stewart and Michael collaborate on a play, the lives of these three become more complicated than Franny could have imagined. Sayers gracefully weaves all of this into a cohesive and compelling tale.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810127237/?tag=2022091-20
Sayers, Valerie was born on August 8, 1952 in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States. Daughter of Paul and Janet (Hogan) Sayers.
Bachelor, Fordham University, 1973; Master of Fine Arts, Columbia University, 1976.
Brain Fever and Who Do You Love were named New York Times "Notable Books of the Year", and the 2002 film Due East is based on her first two novels. Reviewing Who Do You Love, The Chicago Tribune declared: "To say that Valerie Sayers is a natural-born writer wildly underestimates the facts…. She has carved out for herself a corner of the South as clearly delineated as Faulkner’s famous Yoknapatawpha County, a sense of the importance and holiness of place that calls to mind Eudora Welty’s writing on the subject."
Sayers was born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, and educated at Fordham and Columbia.
She lived in New York for many years.
Sayers is most often read in the lineage of Mary Flannery O"Connor, Carson McCullers, Pat Conroy, and Walker Percy. Her short story "The Other Woman" is published in Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women"s Fiction (1997).
The Powers, which the Washington Post described as "brilliantly realized..in brutally elegant prose" opens in the summer of 1941, and holds the war fever then sweeping across Europe in tension with the contemporary baseball mania sweeping up the United States, a fever fueled by the Yankees" Joe DiMaggio. The journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery featured an interview with Sayers on "Baseball and Fiction".
Northwestern University Press plans to reissue her first five novels during 2013.
Since 1993, Sayers has been a professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. Critical discussions of Sayers"s work appear in Mary East. Reichardt"s Catholic Women Writers: A Biology-bibliographical Sourcebook (2001) and in Bryan Giemza"s Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South (2013). Sayers"s essay "The Word Cure: Cancer, Language, and Prayer" appears in the journal Image.
(Off his medication and slowly going mad, Timothy Rooney, ...)
(The romance between Franny, a free-wheeling Southern girl...)
( Something old and something new mark Sayers's fifth nov...)
(Sayers's gift for delineating family relationships agains...)
(Sayers's gift for delineating family relationships agains...)
(Mary Faith Rapple wonders when her lover will stop making...)
( Mary Faith Rapple is smart, pretty in a rangy, gray-eye...)
(Franny Starkey has been breaking men’s hears since she wa...)
Her writing has considered the experience of Irish Catholics in the American South, the forces of segregation and Civil Rights, and the place of pacifism in domestic politics. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such publications as The New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Image, Witness, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.
Quotations:
"To say that Valerie Sayers is a natural-born writer wildly underestimates the facts…. She has carved out for herself a corner of the South as clearly delineated as Faulkner’s famous Yoknapatawpha County, a sense of the importance and holiness of place that calls to mind Eudora Welty’s writing on the subject." Sayers was born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, and educated at Fordham and Columbia. She lived in New York for many years.
Her writing has considered the experience of Irish Catholics in the American South, the forces of segregation and Civil Rights, and the place of pacifism in domestic politics.
Sayers is most often read in the lineage of Mary Flannery O"Connor, Carson McCullers, Pat Conroy, and Walker Percy. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such publications as The New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Image, Witness, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.
Her short story "The Other Woman" is published in Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women"s Fiction (1997). The Powers, which the Washington Post described as "brilliantly realized..in brutally elegant prose" opens in the summer of 1941, and holds the war fever then sweeping across Europe in tension with the contemporary baseball mania sweeping up the United States, a fever fueled by the Yankees" Joe DiMaggio.
The journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery featured an interview with Sayers on "Baseball and Fiction".
Member Modern Language Association, American Association of University Professors, National Book Critics Circuit, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association American Center.
Married Christian Raúl Jara, June 29, 1974. Children: Christian, Raúl.