Ourselves

About the Book

"As fine a portrait of late adolescence as any in recent years," said Richard Locke in The New York Times. "Like a solid, modest but finely structured piece of chamber music... an unmodish, underplayed novel that makes you sit up and smile."

About the Author

Jonathan Strong was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1944 and grew up in nearby Winnetka.  He graduated from Harvard College in 1969, the same year he published his first book, a collection of short fiction called Tike and Five Stories, which won the 1970 Rosenthal Foundation Award for the National Institute or Arts and Letters.  Two of the stories had been included in the O. Henry Awards anthologies, and part of the novella Tike had first appeared in Northwestern's Triquarterly Review.

    He taught part-time at Tufts for nine years, and in 1978 began a five-year Briggs-Copeland Assistant Professorship at Harvard.  His second book, the novel Ourselves, appeared in 1971, but his third--two novellas collected as Companion Pieces--had to wait until 1993 for book publication.  Sections of it were published in Triquarterly and Shenandoah.

He also taught at Umass--Boston and Wellesley College before returning to Tufts as a senior lecturer in 1989, by which time his fourth book, Elsewhere, had been published (Ballantine, 1985).  In the 1990s, Zoland Books has brought out all of his subsequent works: Offspring, An Untold Tale, Secret Words (for which he was awarded an NEA grant), The Old World, A Circle Around Her, and the forthcoming Consolation.  He lives with his partner Scott Elledge in Rockport, Massachusetts.