Susan Coll Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Susan Coll
Susan Coll was born in New York and went to Occidental College, in Los Angeles.

Her work has appeared in publications like the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR.org, atlantic.com, and The Millions.

She was the president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation for 5 years and she has worked at the Politics & Prose Bookstore.

“Acceptance” was made into a 2009 television film that starred Joan Cusack and Mae Whitman.

“Karlmarx.com” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2001. Ella Kennedy is in a rut. She’s nearly 30, and it appears that she’s on the verge of becoming both a continual failure at relationships and a perpetual grad student. She’s spent about 3 years at Columbia University now ripping up outlines for various thesis topics as her chosen field of Marxist scholarship becomes more and more irrelevant.

Temporarily estranged from her obscenely wealthy dad (America’s king of discount merchandise) and out of money, she’s forced into taking a job in Washington, DC at the fledgling Institute of Thought. Her assignment: establish this web site and a mail order catalog to market Karl Marx paraphernalia. But her dilemma is that she is computer illiterate, and is distracted by the fact that she’s found a thesis topic finally that she finds engaging. Against her advisor’s advice, she sets out to document the tragic life of Eleanor, Karl’s youngest daughter, and a brilliant woman that self destructed during the course of one bad relationship.

Meanwhile, during her first day on the job, she finds a lost ornithologist called Nigel Lark at the door. He’s adorably disheveled and has this delicious accent and it’s love at first sight. While their relationship develops rapidly, however, it dawns on Ella that her own life is starting to parallel the unfortunate path of her dissertation subject. Nigel wears a wedding band and doesn’t want to talk about it, for one thing.

“Rockville Pike” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2004. Jane Kramer had never imagined a life selling discount furniture in between commuting soccer fields and grocery stores via a minivan. However once her father-in-law has a heart attack, she and Leon (her husband) trade their glamorous New York life in for a stint running the family business on Rockville Pike, this tributary of the suburban sprawl line that extends outward from Washington, DC Kramer’s Discount Furniture Depot sits away from several lines of traffic, close to the tombstone of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

This is where Jane escapes every day at her lunchtime to ponder her confusing turn in life. At the age of 41, she’s got a teen Goth son, her husband’s increasingly quick tempered and overweight, and their business is in a state of crisis, both legally and financially. Jane finds herself wishing for something more.

First, add into this mix Delia, this oddly predatory patio-furniture saleswoman that appears to have her sights set on Leon, and then this attack on the store expansion plans by some historic preservationists. When some potentially disturbing findings about Delia’s past are brought to light, Jane finds herself discovering that, despite some of life’s reversals, it’s possible to reinvent herself by tapping into desires and talents she never realized she still had.

This is a witty, smart, and funny read which revels in the joy of learning what life’s got in store.

“Acceptance” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 2007. A comic chronicle of one year in the life in the college admissions cycle. It is spring break of junior year and the college admissions hysteria has started setting in. “AP” Harry (having been named because of the unprecedented number of advanced placement courses he’s taken) and his mom take a detour off his first choice of Harvard, in order to visit Yates, this liberal arts school located in the Northeast which enjoys a surge in popularity as a result of this statistical error which landed it on the top-50 list of the US News & World Report rankings.

Harry, on Yates’ dilapidated grounds, runs into two of his classmates from Verona High, this elite public school out in the suburbs of Washington, DC. There is Maya Kaluantharana, this gifted athlete whose own mediocre SAT scores so alarm her family that they’ve declared her learning disabled, and Taylor Rockefeller, Harry’s brooding neighbor, who merely wants to take a good long look at the dormitory bathrooms.

With the engaging honesty of Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep” and the human spirit of Tom Perotta, Susan reveals the frantic world of college admissions, where kids recalibrate their GPAs based on daily quizzes, families relocate in order to enhance the chance for Ivy League slots, and everybody’s looking for the formula for admittance.

Meanwhile, Olivia Sheraton (Yates admission officer) sifts through applications looking for something, anything really, to distinguish one applicant from the next. For all, the price of admission requires compromise; for a few, the whole ordeal blossoms into this unexpected journey of discovery.

“Beach Week” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in 2010. Beach week is this time honored tradition in which the DC suburbs’ latest herd of high school graduates flocks down to Chelsea Beach for 7 days of debauched celebration. Ten teen girls plan this unhinged blowout the likes of which their young selves have never seen before. They smuggle vodka in their water bottles and horde prescription pills by the dozen. All the while, their affluent and misguided parents are much too busy worrying over the legal liabilities to fret about any missing pills or some random hookups.

For Jordan McMillan and her family, however, such a rite of passage threatens to become more than mere frivolous fun. The teen’s parents, Charles and Leah, may not allow their kid to attend at all. Their marriage is in ruins, their old house languishes on the market, and bills are piling up. With all of that stress, it quickly appears they’re behaving just as irresponsibly as their daughter and all her friends.

Susan satirizes a new teen rite of passage, and in the process dismantles lives of families in transition. This is a well observed, hilarious look at childhood’s end and the human need to commemorate it, expensively.