Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Micheline Aharonian Marcom (born 1968) is an American novelist.

Life and work

Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1968 to an American father and an Armenian-Lebanese mother. She grew up in Los Angeles, but as a child in the years before the Lebanese Civil War, she spent summers in Beirut with her mother's family.

Her first book and the beginning of a trilogy of novels, Three Apples Fell from Heaven (2001), is set in Turkey between 1915–1917 and depicts the Ottoman government's genocide of the Armenian population. It was named one of the best books of the year by both The Washington Post[1] and the Los Angeles Times.[2] Her second book in the trilogy, The Daydreaming Boy (2004), which earned her the 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction, is centered on a middle-aged survivor of the genocide living in a 1960s Beirut which itself is facing collapse. The culmination of the trilogy, Draining the Sea (2008), is a fierce critique of America's complicit involvement in the Guatemalan Civil War.

Marcom’s fourth novel—whose original title “The Edge of Love" was a reference to Clarice Lispector's story That’s Where I’m Going—was published by Dalkey Archive Press as The Mirror in the Well (2008).

Her fifth book, A Brief History of Yes, was published in June 2013 by Dalkey Archive Press.

Her sixth book, The Brick House, was published in November 2017 by Awst Press. The Brick House is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world's beauty, and of ongoing environmental degradation. In this short but moving work, travelers confront their lives in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for, a strangeness mirrored in the accompanying illustrations by Fowzia Karimi. The book is inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and follows in the tradition of Armenian illuminated manuscripts. The New American, her seventh novel about a DREAMer who is deported to Guatemala and makes his way home to California, was published August 2020.

In 2008, Marcom taught at Haigazian University in Beirut on a Fulbright Fellowship. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Awards

Publications
  • Three Apples Fell from Heaven. Riverhead Books. 2001. ISBN 978-1-57322-915-9.
  • The Daydreaming Boy. Riverhead Books. 2004. ISBN 978-1-59448-075-1.
  • Draining the Sea. Riverhead Books. 2008. ISBN 978-1-59448-973-0.
  • The Mirror in the Well. Dalkey Archive Press. 2008. ISBN 978-1-56478-511-4.
  • A Brief History of Yes. Dalkey Archive Press. 2013. ISBN 978-1-56478-849-8
  • The Brick House. Awst Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-99719-385-5
  • The New American. Simon & Schuster. 2020. ISBN 978-1982120726

References
  1. "A look back at the titles of 2001 that won the greatest praise from our reviewers -- in their own words". The Washington Post. 2 December 2001.
  2. "The Best Books of 2001". Los Angeles Times. 2 December 2001. Retrieved 7 May 2015.
  3. United States Artists Official Website
  4. Benson, Heidi. "Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Saudi - Media (3 of 5) Bay Area writers crowd dais / Whiting". The San Francisco Chronicle.
  5. "Two Mills Professors Win Prestigious Whiting Writers' Prizes". Mills College. Retrieved 7 May 2015.
  6. "Mills Professor/Alumna Micheline Aharonian Marcom Wins 2005 PEN/USA Award For Fiction". Mills College. Retrieved 7 May 2015.
  7. "Micheline Aharonian Marcom". Lannan Foundation. Retrieved 7 May 2015.
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