User:Msunderland/Cara Hoffman

[=Cara Hoffman=

Cara Hoffman is a New York City based novelist and journalist. Simon & Schuster will publish So Much Pretty, her first novel, on March 15th, 2011. She was born in rural New York State and has one son.

LIFE
EARLY YEARS

Hoffman grew up in upstate New York. She has two brothers. As a child and adolescent she studied music and ballet. Hoffman dropped out of High School and lived in Europe in her late teens, settling in Athens, Greece where she worked in a hotel.

CAREER

Upon returning to the states, she gave birth to her son, and worked delivering papers which led to a job as an investigative reporter. Without a high school or college degree, Hoffman rose through the ranks at different newspapers. She has called her career path a very “1940s trajectory."

She became interested in small press, collective, and anti-authoritarian publishing in the early 2000s. In 2004 she published an unedited print-on-demand roman a clef about living in Athens, as well as a collection of short stories, with the education and learning collective Factory School. She also self-published an anthology of work by homeless writers from upstate New York.

Hoffman worked for a number of publications including Fifth Estate, the longest running anti-authoritarian magazine in North America. She taught writing at Loaves and Fishes, a soup kitchen in Ithaca, New York and later taught English at Lehman Alternative Community School and worked as an adjunct professor at Tompkins Cortland Community College.

EDUCATION

Hoffman believes her nontraditional education allowed her to become a reporter who focused on educating the community, not selling papers. In the 2000’s, she began exploring the idea of writing fiction, instead of journalism. While lecturing at Godard College in 2006, for the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference, she decided to pursue an MFA despite her lack of a high school or undergraduate diploma.

SO MUCH PRETTY
So Much Pretty, is a rural crime novel with stark themes about violence and misogyny.

From the publisher:

“So Much Pretty is a novel about family, community, and storytelling.

The Pipers are a family built on optimism. On deeply felt ideals and commitment to their community. Claire and Gene moved with their precocious, beguiling daughter Alice to Haeden, New York for a fresh start, to give Alice the freedom and opportunity they always wanted for themselves. In doing so, they unwittingly re-write the story of her life.

Wendy White has strong roots in Haeden, a late-blooming young woman just striking out on her own, but mindful of family and home. Her story has a beginning and an end, but is missing the most important piece—the middle. What happened to Wendy White?

Stacey Flynn is a reporter, both a seeker and a teller of stories. It is gritty, relentless and ultimately reckless Flynn who will chronicle Wendy White’s existence from all the fragments she can find, and forge a path toward the end.

But only we will ever know the whole story.”

"This beautiful, stealthy novel creeps up on the mesmerized reader, subtly drawing new strands into itself until what begins as the suspenseful story of a rural American murder grows into a dark, disquieting and urgently fascinating examination of the violence and concealment practiced by a whole society. By choosing a small town canvas on which to paint her big picture, Hoffman achieves a focused intensity which she holds on the very edge of anger, without once giving in to it. She never surrenders the compassion, insightfulness and humor that make her a masterful navigator of the human heart. This is an impassioned, intelligent and important work of art, and with it Hoffman takes her place in that select group of American novelists including Philipp Meyer and Adam Haslett who, eschewing nihilism and hauteur, write with urgency and passion about what is really going on out there." - Chris Cleave author of Little Bee and Incendiary

Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust, has called So Much Pretty a book “certain to be talked about—not merely because it is a profound meditation on both public and private violence in small-town America, but for its captivating storytelling which draws you in on a visceral level and leaves you feeling haunted, in the best of ways."

SO MUCH PRETTY is a compelling whodunit, an unnerving portrait of just what the back of nowhere looks like, and an arresting meditation on our culture's ongoing acceptance of violence against women. It's powered by both a despairing tenderness and an unflinching rage, each of which, as the novel makes heartbreakingly clear, are more than justified. – Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand Anyway

INTERNET
Hoffman actively blogs on her website, carahoffman.com, and tweets on her twitter, twitter.com/Carahoffman.