In Zanesville: A Novel - Hardcover

Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

PRAISE FOR IN ZANESVILLE:

"A fierce, funny, brave, and bracingly honest new novel....Every bit as poignant and powerful as The Catcher in the Rye."―Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

"An exuberant first novel....Beard has a knack for melding the funny and the sad, amplifying small moments into something big."―Sussannah Meadows, New York Times

"Masterfully wrought...this novel is at times downright hilarious and often hold-your-breath-and-hope-for-the-best suspenseful. The restraint with which Beard deploys moments of tension and humor makes each page glimmer."―Samuel Reaves Slaton, O Magazine

"Epic and profound. These thoughtful, funny, awestruck, slightly peculiar girls are so endearing, so painfully true."―Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly

"A sure-handed first novel ....It's impossible not to be charmed."―Yvonne Zipp, Washington Post

"A smashing coming-of-age story.... Beard is a faultless chronicler of the young and hopeful; readers couldn't ask for a better guide for a trip through the wilds of adolescence."―Publishers Weekly

"Moving.... Beard travels the well-worn road of budding young womanhood with surprising freshness."―Courtney Jones, Booklist

"Beard has beautifully captured how a shy but observant girl might interpret the awkwardness and the struggle for acceptance in the high school's perplexing social milieu.... Resonates as a bittersweet remembrance."―Kirkus

"Jo Ann Beard has written a mesmerizing account of a time in a girl's life when every moment, every action, is laden with enormous importance. It is so beautifully written, so perfect in its pitch, that I couldn't put it down."―Ann Patchett, author of Run

"Full of charm and wisdom and laugh-out-loud humor, In Zanesville will have readers recalling their own years of wonder and want and fear and doubt. I loved literally every character, every scene."―Elizabeth Berg, author of Once Upon a Time, There Was You