Her memoir Unveiling the Prophet was named Best Book of the Year by the Riverfront Times her novel Nerves of the Heart was a finalist in the Peter Taylor Prize competition her collection Leaving the Neighborhood and Other Stories was the 2000 winner of the Mid-List First Series Award. The Lost Daughter (2012) was a Book-of-the-Month pick, was and has appeared in Poland and China. Her most recent novel is A Sister to Honor (Penguin, 2015). Her short fiction collection, Foreign Climes (Brighthorse, 2021) won the Brighthorse Books Award.

Louis, Lucy Ferriss has lived on both coasts, in the middle, and abroad. Allen Gee, author of My Chinese Americaīorn in St. This collection should be savored and widely read. These splendid wide-ranging essays are filled with moments of hard-earned wisdom and deep realization with each of Lucy Ferris's experiences, I found myself admiring the thoughts and questions from where her writing so intelligently takes us. Marcia Aldrich, author of Girl Rearing and Companion to an Untold Story Unlike a scholarly piece on the social custom of the Brazilian bikini wax that might reach a firm ideological and moralistic conclusion, “Bush” raises questions and sees where they go.

“Bush” probes its subject, poking here and there, turning it on its side this way and that, to catch, in James Merrill’s words, “a steadily more revealing light.” “Bush” negotiates a contemporary “depilatory dilemma” with stylistic deftness of touch and elegant concision. When Fourth Genre received “Bush” by Lucy Ferriss, we thought it a startling example of the kind of essay we were always on the lookout for-an essay that combines cultural observation with personal revelation. Carolyn Kuebler, Editor, New England Review She can leap from a single musical note to ideas about mediocrity, code-switching, funambulism, and the Quakers, choreographing it all into a coherent and luminous whole. Lucy Ferriss’s meditations reveal an agile and curious mind at play, as one thought leads effortlessly to another. Sudip Bose, Interim Editor, The American Scholar This is a writer you want to spend hour upon hour with, reveling in the cadences of her prose, marveling at her ability to glean wisdom from her present and her past, and from the writers before her who have similarly contemplated the intensity of human suffering and joy, delight and pain. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist’s art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar. Lucy Ferriss’s modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing.

The Lost Daughter by Lucy Ferriss