Green Mountain Prose
Our Books & Bios
Ellen Lesser is the author of two novels, The Blue Streak (Grove, 1992) and The Other Woman (Simon & Schuster, 1988; Washington Square Press, 1989), and a collection of short stories, The Shoplifter's Apprentice (S & S, 1989; WSP, 1990). Her stories have been performed in the “Selected Shorts” series on National Public Radio and anthologized in Houghton Mifflin’s Images of Women in Literature. Her fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in periodicals including The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Epoch, The Southern Review, The Village Voice and New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly. She has recently completed the manuscript for her third novel, Henna.
Ellen is a graduate of Yale College, where she studied writing with John Hersey, Gordon Lish and Alice Walker. She began leading adult fiction workshops in 1983, while a student in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at Vermont College. In 1989 she joined the Vermont College MFA faculty, on which she has served continuously since, teaching graduate-level writers of fiction and nonfiction in a low-residency format. For the past six summers, she has led novel workshops at the Annual Vermont College Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, and has also taught at the Indiana University, Mount Holyoke and Stonecoast summer conferences.
Christopher Noel is the author of the novel Hazard and the Five Delights (Knopf, 1988), the memoir In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing: A Geography of Grief (Random House, 1996), and the collection of short stories, A Frail House (2005). His short fiction has appeared in The Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Northeast Magazine, Yellow Silk, and in the anthology The Book of Eros (Crown, 1995). He has been a writer-in-residence at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. He has recently completed his second novel, The Sea Monkey Tombs, and he is currently working on short stories and personalessays.
He received a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Yale and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. He has taught writing and literature at Goddard College, Skidmore College, and, for the past thirteen years, in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College, working one-on-one with more than two hundred students on a wide range of manuscript projects, both fiction and creative nonfiction at various stages of the drafting process. He has led memoir workshops at the Vermont College Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. During the summer of 1999, he served as Senior Fiction Fellow at the New York State Writers Institute, where he read novel manuscripts and met with the authors individually for extensive consultation. For the past five years, he has also worked as an editorial consultant with freelance clients.
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“Ellen Lesser takes what would normally be a negative or stereotypical figure, ‘the other woman,’ and allows her to mature before us. There is no evil ex-wife, no prince of a man on a white horse; these are true-to-life characters, guaranteed to spark recognition and emotions. Realistic and satisfying, this novel explores the underseams of relationships without any quick and easy answers. Lesser had my full attention from beginning to end.”
--Jill McCorkle, author of Crash Diet andTending to Virginia
“Lesser has fashioned a wonderfully subtle portrait of the relationships between these characters….It’s an utterly believablesituation, and as gripping and dramatic in the way it unfolds as a mystery or a thriller…a novel of real drama and suspense, skillfully and…compellingly written—a first-rate story, full of wisdom and insights about human nature and relationships.”
--Joyce Maynard, author of Baby Love, in Mademoiselle
“The Other Woman is about five people, really, each trapped in the double exposure of hopelessly overlapping relationships. With astonishing fluidity and grace, and a clarity rare in a first novel, Ellen Lesser limns this thoroughly modern dilemma.”
--Sharon Sheehe Stark, author of A Wrestling Season
“There is not one line in this book, not one phrase that isn’t true to human nature.”
--Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine
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"A fine novel. It is a wonderful evocation of adolescence in all its mystery and complexity. Hazard is unforgettable."
--Annie Dillard
"Hazard and the Five Delights reads like the book William Blake would have written had he been reincarnated in the second half of the twentieth century in small-town Vermont. It's oddly old-fashioned and winningly strange."
--Diane Lefer
"There is a sweet wisdom and quirky charm in his storytelling."
--The New York Times Book Review
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“In arpeggios as fleet and bright as summer lightning, Ellen Lesser runs deftly through every octave of family life. Whether she plays bass cords of sorrow and loss or grace notes of laughter, her touch is sure and light. Danny Winger is an unforgettable character and The Blue Streak is a virtuoso performance.”
--Susan Dodd, author of Mamaw
“The Blue Streak is a moving exploration of the bittersweet connections that bind father to son, generation to generation. Ellen Lesser again demonstrates she possesses the imaginative empathy and psychological insight that only our finest writers bring to the task.”
--W.D. Wetherell, author of Morning and Chekhov’s Sister
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"Christopher Noel says the toughest, most poignant things there are to say--to himself, and to us--and with decided clarity, even humor, confirms the power of the human spirit to survive. His narrative of loss and the uncanny persistence of memory is beautiful and disturbing. Truly, it's heartbreaking why he had to map this 'geography of grief'--yet it's our great good fortune that he had the emotional courage and novelist's genius to do so."
--Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
"Chris Noel writes very well indeed. His book is an honest one and therefore painful."
--Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Readers who’ve lost someone they’ve loved—and indeed, every reader—will be grateful for the way that Noel has struggled to find the necessary words to capture his experience. He looks long and hard at the torturous mental processes of the survivor, all the little ways we try to understand the unthinkable…to force the absurd to make some sort of sense. A heartbreaking love story, Water Landing travels through emotional territory so difficult we think we won’t be able to bear it, but Christopher Noel’s writing guides us through, even as he guides himself.”
--Mark Doty, author of Heaven’s Coast and Firebird, in Elle Magazine
“Sometimes, the closest we get to answering the saddest questions life asks us is to respond in the most beautiful language we can muster. Christopher Noel does this.”
--Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face
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“Full of keenly rendered moments…impressive style…Well-observed and evocative. Ellen Lesser has a way of conjuring up scenes that vibrate with subtle tensions.”
--The New York Times Book Review
“Measured, pungent stories…Lesser writes with grace and insight about alienation—that of her generation in particular and modern Americans in general.”
--People Magazine
“These eleven supple stories quietly, deftly probe the complicated relations of their characters…The Shoplifter’s Apprentice, outstanding for its lyricism and control, is a pleasure to read.”
--Publisher’s Weekly
“…deft and sure. Most of these stories deal with one-on-one relationships…and they often strike emotions, re-create suspensions of being and of feeling, that we instantly recognize, but which have no name.”
--The Washington Post Book World
