Evgenia Citkowitz was born in New York and educated at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London, later returning to the US to attend Barnard. Her short stories have been published in various UK magazines. Her screenplay of The House in Paris based on Elizabeth Bowen’s novel is currently in development with Hit and Run Productions. She has also written a short story collection, Ether, to be published by FSG, and her adaptation of Van der Jagt’s The Story of My Baldness has been taken on by the same producers for the Oscar winning motion picture Juno.
Juliet Stevenson will be reading one of her stories at the Latitude Festival and the story will be available online on the 24th July .
Photograph/Suzanne Tenner
Agent: Caroline Michel (cmichel@pfd.co.uk)
Senior Assistant: Laurie Robertson (lrobertson@pfd.co.uk)
0207 344 1084
Assistant: Lucy Irvine (lirvine@pfd.co.uk)
0207 344 1028
ETHER — Buy it here
In “Leavers’ Events,” a teenage girl awaits exam results and has a sexual encounter with a teacher that she hopes will define her. In “Sunday’s Child,” a middle-aged actress evicts a homeless woman from her garden, which precipitates a crisis of conscience. In “The Bachelor’s Table,” a lawyer takes advantage of an accounting mistake and sets in motion a sequence of events that force him to evaluate his actions. In the title story, “Ether,” a blocked writer plagiarizes his own life with devastating consequences.
All the characters in Evgenia Citkowitz’s first collection of short fiction are connected by the quest for identity. Some are poised at a crossroads, while others teeter on the edge of a moral precipice. The stories are startlingly original, haunting, and often funny. From a hamster cage in Los Angeles to the bowels of the great houses of London and Long Island, Citkowitz depicts her characters’ frailties and humanity with a mordant humor and tenderness that never diminish their complexity.
“Citkowitz flouts expectations….She doesn’t sound like anyone else you’ll have read in a very long while.” — The New York Times
“How coolly poised, Evgenia Ciktowitz’s prose! And how elegantly and richly detailed her fictional worlds! It’s something of a shock then to realize that in this debut collection the young author is depicting individuals devastated by emotion, if not decorticated, numbed . . . sharply observed, resolutely unsentimental, and wholly engaging.” –Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
PUBLISHER: FSG
PUBLICATION DATE: 21 June 2011