About this item
"The Virginity of Famous Men, "award-winning story writer Christine Sneed's deeply perceptive collection on the human condition, features protagonists attempting to make peace with the paths they have taken thus far. In The Prettiest Girls, a location scout for a Hollywood film studio falls in love with a young Mexican woman who is more in love with the idea of stardom than with this older American man who takes her with him back to California. Clear Conscience focuses on the themes of family loyalty, divorce, motherhood, and whether doing the right thing is, in fact, always the right thing to do. In Beach Vacation, a mother realizes that her popular and coddled teenaged son has become someone she has difficulty relating to, let alone loving with the same maternal fervor that once was second nature to her.
About the Author
Christine Sneed, winner of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, is the author most recently of The Virginity of Famous Men (Bloomsbury, 2016) , a story collection, winner of the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, and a finalist for Chicago Review of Books's 2016 best work of fiction. The Virginity of Famous Men was also one of four featured titles in Northern Public Radio WNIJ's Read with Me winter 2017 book club and one of Booklist's best books of the year. Sneed's other books are the novels Paris, He Said (Bloomsbury, 2015) , Little Known Facts (Bloomsbury, 2013) , and a second story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, a 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize winner, a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Award (first-fiction category) , winner of the 2011 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, and 2011 Book of the Year from the Chicago Writers Association (in the traditionally published fiction category) . The San Francisco Chronicle also chose Portraits as one of the fifty best fiction books of 2011.
Her second book, Little Known Facts, focuses on a successful Hollywood actor and the effects of his fame on his two ex-wives and his two grown children, especially his son. Little Known Facts won the Society of Midland Authors Award for best work of fiction in 2013, and was named a top ten debut novel by Booklist.
Her third book and second novel, Paris, He Said, is centered on the life and ambitions of a young artist, Jayne Marks, who is in the thrall of a worldly and affluent Frenchman. This novel is set in contemporary Paris and New York City. Paris, He Said was a 2016 Illinois Reads selection and one of Reader Digest UK's 17 literary highlights of 2015.
Sneed's short stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, New England Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Meridian, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, and a number of other journals. Christine has also published many poems in North American literary journals, was awarded an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in poetry in 2003 and has received numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. Some of her literary influences include Alice Munro, Martin Amis, Jim Harrison, Deborah Eisenberg, Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Scott Spencer, William Trevor, Edward P. Jones, Penelope Fitzgerald, Penelope Lively and John Updike.
She earned a Master's of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Indiana University - Bloomington and a Bachelor of Science degree in French language and literature from Georgetown University.
Sneed lives outside of Chicago and is the faculty director of the MA/MFA program in creative writing at Northwestern University. She is also on the faculty of Regis University's low-residency MFA program in Denve
