Amy Bloom Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom’s stories have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and various anthologies both here and abroad.

Amy has written many pilot scripts (both for network and cable) and wrote, created, and ran the excellent yet short lived “State of Mind” series, which starred Lili Taylor.

Amy’s written for the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Vogue, Salon, and Slate, as well as many other publications. She has also won a National Magazine Award.

Amy’s debut novel, called “Love Invents Us”, was released in the year 1996. Her work is from the literary fiction, historical, and mystery genres.

“Love Invents Us” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 1996. Amy tells the story of growing up which is funny and sharp, uncompromisingly real and rueful. One chubby girl, named Elizabeth Taube, with her smudged pink harlequin glasses and a bad habit of stealing Heath Bars from the local five-and-dime. She is the only child of parents and it’s their indifference to her is the only sure thing she’s got in her life. When her quest to find attention and love leads her into the arms of her junior high English teacher, things start getting complicated.

Even her buddy, Mrs. Hill, who is an almost blind and elderly black woman, is unable to protect her when true love (passionate, heartbreaking, and exhilarating) comes into her life in the beautiful shape of Huddie Lester.

Bloom shows us, with her unflinching sensibility and finely honed style just how profoundly the forces of desire and love are able to shape a life. It also shows how love can come in many different forms.

Amy is a surprising and perceptive writer, and readers never knew where this slender yet richly envisioned novel would take them next. She delivers a compellingly unpretentious, bold, and pleasantly nonjudgmental. It is a coming of age novel which is both uncomfortable and beautiful at the exact same time.

“Away” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2007. This novel is the intimate and epic tale of young Lillian Leyb, who is an accidental heroine, and a dangerous innocent.

Lillian, after her family gets destroyed by a Russian pogrom, comes to America by herself, and determined to make her way in this new land. When word comes that Sophie, her daughter, may still be alive, she embarks on this odyssey which takes her from the world that makes up the Yiddish theater out on New York’s Lower East Side, up to Seattle’s Jazz District, and then up further to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail heading to Siberia.

All the qualities that readers love in Amy’s work: her wit and humor, her unflinching comprehension of the human heart and passion, and her irreverent and elegant language all come together in the embrace of this clever novel. It is romantic, heartbreaking, and wholly unforgettable.

This novel grabs you right from the start, and Amy does a great job of showing rather than just telling. This is a beautiful novel that is incredibly researched that each of the situations and characters ring with authenticity.

“Lucky Us” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2013. This novel introduces us to Iris and Eva. Disappointed by each of their families, Iris (who is the hopeful star) and Eva (her sidekick) take a trip across forties America to find fortune and fame.

Iris’ ambitions take them both from small-town Ohio to the sensuous and unexpected Hollywood, across the America of Reinvention in one stolen station wagon, off to the golden mansions and jazz clubs in Long Island.

With their friends in low and high places, they shine and stumble through a landscape of scandals, big dreams, war, and betrayals. This novel is about failure and success, bad luck and good, creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life.

From the beauty parlors in Brooklyn to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people lie, love, survive, and cheat in this tale of our absurd, fragile, and heroic species.

This is a shocking, endearing, profound, and believable. Amy’s strong prose, the immense and mind blowing detail behind the characters’ thoughts, the geographical and historical surroundings help bring this novel to life vividly and keep readers glued to everything that happens.

“White Houses” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in the year 2018. In 1932, Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt when she’s reporting on Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign. “Hick”, as she’s known to her admirers and friends, grew up worse than poor in South Dakota and then reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in all of America. She is not all that instantly charmed by the patrician and idealistic Eleanor.

However while her connection with the future first lady deepens into full intimacy, what started as a powerful passion blooms into a lasting love, and a life which Hick never expected to have. She moves back into the White House, where her status a “first friend” is an open secret, just like FDR’s own lovers.

She takes a job within the Roosevelt administration, protecting and promoting both Roosevelts, she gets to know Franklin not just as a great president but also as a complex rival and quite the irresistible friend. And as a person capable of changing lives even after he’s died. Through all of it, even while Hick’s bond with Eleanor gets tested by forces that are both common and extraordinary, and while she grows as a woman and as a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her own life.

From Hyde Park to Washington DC, from a small white house out on Long Island to some apartment on Manhattan’s Washington Square, this novel moves quite elegantly through some fascinating times and places. It was written in compelling prose with acuity, emotional depth, and wit.

This is a gorgeous love story, and Amy’s eloquently constructed a meditation of love’s power.