Monk, Bathsheba 1966-

PERSONAL: Born 1966.

ADDRESSES: Home—Allentown, PA. Agent—David Kuhn, Kuhn Projects, LLC, 126 5th Ave., Ste. 3A, New York, NY 10011. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Military service: U.S. Army.

WRITINGS

Now You See It . . . : Stories from Cokesville, PA (short stories), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2006.

Has contributed to periodicals, including Los Angeles Times and New York Times Sunday Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: In her first book, Now You See It . . . : Stories from Cokesville, PA, Bathsheba Monk presents seventeen linked short stories that take place between 1948 and 1994. The stories reflect life in the fictional eastern Pennsylvania industrial town and present a range of fictional characters over several generations who struggle with a difficult life or leave town in search of a new one, such as Tess who goes off to Hollywood and becomes a soap-opera star. Nevertheless, even those who leave remain connected to the town and its hard living and slightly off-kilter inhabitants. In one story, a steelworker, Bruno Gojuk, falls into a vat of molten metal and his widow is given a 175-pound ingot, representing the weight of the man when he signed on to work at the plant, even though he weighed 200 pounds when he died. The ingot takes Bruno’s place at his wake. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the story collection “a pleasurable . . . examination of hardscrabble lives and hapless dreams.” Carlo Rotella, writing in the Chicago Tribune, commented: “The decline and fall of American heavy industry forms the narrative backdrop against which the individual stories unfold, a great transformation that alternately pounds down [Monk’s] characters and sets them bewilderingly adrift.” In a review on the Rain Taxi Web site, William Bush referred to the author’s “quietly confident prose.” Reba Leiding noted in the Library Journal that the author “makes us see that we are all exiles in a changing world.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

PERIODICALS

Boston Globe, July 7, 2006, Amanda Heller, review of Now You See It . . . : Stories from Cokesville, PA.

Chicago Sun-Times, July 9, 2006, Teresa Budsai, review of Now You See It . . . .

Chicago Tribune, May 28, 2006, Carlo Rotella, review of Now You See It . . . .

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2006, review of Now You See It . . . , p. 374.

Library Journal, March 1, 2006, Reba Leiding, review of Now You See It . . . , p. 80.

New Yorker, June 19, 2006, review of Now You See It . . . .

Philadelphia Inquirer, July 26, 2006, Karen Heller, review of Now You See It . . . .

Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), July 30, 2006, review of Now You See It . . . .

Times-Picayune, June 25, 2006, Susan Larson, review of Now You See It . . . .

Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2006, Kate Flately, review of Now You See It . . . .

ONLINE

Bathsheba Monk Home Page, http://www.bathshebamonk.com (November 26, 2006).

Esquire.com, http://www.esquire.com/ (June 21, 2006), Anna Godbersen, review of Now You See It . . . .

Rain Taxi, http://www.raintaxi.com/ (November 26, 2006), William Bush, review of Now You See It . . . .