Spotlight On: Shae by Mesha Maren
For my generation, your coming out story was huge. Right, like when did you come out and how did it go?, and I’m sure that’s still a part of many people’s narratives, but I do have the feeling that things have shifted. The fluidity of both Cam and Shae’s sexuality and the conversations or sometimes lack of conversations around it felt very real to my sister in terms of the conversations she has had with her teenagers, and I was glad that came across as being real.
― Mesha Maren, Southern Review of Books
What booksellers are saying about Shae
- What a gorgeous gut punch of a book! Maren has outdone herself with her third novel; I was in love from the first page. In an almost epistolary style, Shae takes us through her history with Cam – from friend to lover to – something else – in small-town Appalachia. Hints drop to show us that things go south fast even as Cam and Shae experience the rush of first love. I could tell things wouldn’t end well from the start but I couldn’t put it down until I knew what happened to Shae, Cam, and Eva. Maren’s prose will break your heart even while you stop to soak in its beauty. Readers of Karen Tucker’s Bewilderness will love this story of being young, queer, and addicted with no way out. Do not miss this book.
― Andrea Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia | BUY
- Mesha Maren is a haunting writer, and I’ve long been a fan of the way she captures the changing face of the South in her pages. Shae was impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
― Ashley Warlick, M Judson, Booksellers in Greenville, South Carolina | BUY
- How does someone end up falling down the whole of opioid abuse? In this tender-hearted and revealing novel by the acclaimed author of Sugar Run, she compassionately explores addiction, poverty, isolation, queerness, and family in a riveting tale that embraces complex and sometimes tragic characters with open arms.
― Seth Tucker, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky | BUY
About Mesha Maren
Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run and Perpetual West (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.
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