Ilana Masad Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Ilana Masad
Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American author nonfiction, fiction, and criticism. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and has received her Masters in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Her work has appeared such places as LA Times, the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Tin House’s Open Bar, 7×7, Catapult, Buzzfeed, NPR, and StoryQuarterly among many other places.

Ilana is the host and founder of The Other Stories, which is an interview podcast that features fiction writers. It is her labor of love that she started doing while she was freelancing and living in New York after she had graduated from college. She continued to think about just how writers don’t really get to talk about their work all that much. The smaller writers that are trying to find agents, writing stories and sending them off to magazines, and just trying to get noticed still.

These writers may get a story published here or there, and then send it to their moms and friends and they’ll say its great or they loved it. But it ends there. The podcast was her way to give a space to new, struggling, as-yet-not famous writers a voice.

During high school, she wrote poems, which were in Hebrew, since she primarily grew up in Israel. At some point, as she was preparing to go to college, she began writing a bunch. And telling stories.

Years later, she found these stories while going through some boxes of old mementos, and was very surprised to discover these things she had written a long time before realizing she was actually a writer.

That being said, she doesn’t believe it was something she ever thought of as something she was until she began taking writing workshops and honing her skills and realizing that more and more there was nothing she would rather do more than spend it around books, words, and keyboards.

She has always loved reading for a long time, but it wasn’t until her late teens that she began thinking about actually making a living out of this love. She knew that it would quite hard, near impossible. This is due due to her having the fortune of having parents that both encouraged her desires but they warned her about the pitfalls that comes with creative work.

While studying at the University of Oxford, during the year she spent abroad, she was encouraged to take part in the full Oxford experience. So she became a proofreader at The Oxford Student. During her second term, she started editing the Arts & Literature section. That same year, she wrote her first book reviews for a tiny and still active site called Lit Pub.

While she was a senior in college she interned at Bookish, and she made friends with two of the editors during her time there, and started freelancing. Mainly, she wrote lists, not straight-up book reviews. Not until she was working freelancing after college for Bustle did she get invited to pen an honest-to-god book review for pay, not much but pay. It was for “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara. She was hooked on this, and loved it just as much as she figured she would. She began trying to figure out how to do more of it, how she could get paid, and who to pitch, all of that.

She finds her mind works in stories and that anything and everything is a story. Her trouble is finding the time to write them and not losing any of the ideas she has. Ilana works a lot as a full time freelancer that her own writing has become secondary.

Ilana has always loved cats, and finds she loves their independent natures. She is an animal lover in general too.

She also finds that she would rather die than not be able to read another book for the rest of her life. She loves their texture, their smell, and the feel of them in her hand. Books are her greatest and first love, and she surrounds herself with them. They help her escape from the world.

Ilana’s debut novel, called “All My Mother’s Lovers”, was released in the year 2020.

“All My Mother’s Lovers” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2020. Intimacy has been something that has always eluded Maggie Krause, age twenty-seven, despite its being brought up by married parents who are the models of domestic bliss. Until Lucia comes into her life. However, when Iris, Maggie’s mom, dies in a car crash, Maggie arrives home only to find an angry brother, a withdrawn father, and, with Iris’ will, five sealed envelopes that are addressed to different mysterious guys that she has never heard of.

In an effort to try and find out the truth about Iris, who didn’t make any secret of her discomfort with her daughter’s sexuality and to run from her own grief, she goes on a road trip. She is determined to go to each of these men and find out what they meant to her mom. Maggie soon finds Iris’ second and hidden life which destroys everything that Maggie believed she knew about her parents’ perfect marriage. What is she actually supposed to tell her brother and father? How is she able to deal with her own relationship when her entire world is now in freefall?

The novel, told over the course of a funeral and shiva, challenges the reader to question the very nature of fulfilling relationships.

Ilana’s debut novel is a tour de force and a tender look at things like motherhood, love, relationships, and how we often times hurt those we love the most with our silence. The novel is compelling and astonishing, and is a novel with family dynamics at its core. It is a big hearted and sharply funny read. Readers found that this is a book that goes hard and doesn’t disappoint. Iris and Maggie are a mother and daughter pair that have a bond so strong that not even death is able to break.