Bill Peak, the Mid-Shore’s “library guy,” has just completed an interview for the Spy with Alice McDermott, who has been called “the Virginia Woolf of American letters.”  Peak’s interview was performed as part of a partnership between the Talbot County Free Library and The Spy to introduce area readers to the poets and writers behind some of our country’s best literature.  

Alice McDermott’s eighth and most recent novel, The Ninth Hour, made it to the Best Books of 2017 lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine, among others.  Her seventh novel, Someone, was long-listed for the National Book Award.  Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.  Charming Billy won the National Book Award.  That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  

McDermott’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers, Commonweal, and elsewhere.  She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature.  In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.  McDermott retired last year from Johns Hopkins, where, for the past 23 years, she served as the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.

This video is approximately sixty minutes in length. You can also listen to this as a podcast at the following:

 

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