Alden Jones (CNF, Fiction) | Boston, MA
Booking Fee: |
Negotiable |
Will Travel: |
Anywhere |
Contact: |
http://www.aldenjones.com/blog/contact/ |
Website: |
http://aldenjones.com |
Alden Jones’ memoir, The Blind Masseuse, was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, winner of an Independent Publishers Book Award in Travel Essays, and named a Top Ten Travel Book by the Huffington Post and Publishers Weekly. Her story collection, Unaccompanied Minors, won the New American Fiction Prize and an Independent Publishers Book Award in Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Post Road, The Believer, and the Best American Travel Writing.
Books
Press & Reviews
Unaccompanied Minors
“Alden Jones is as intrepid a storyteller as she is courageous an observer. These gangs of boys and girls, overgrown teens, misfits, downcasts and family problem kids will fascinate you with their tough talk and suddenly tender ways. Whether selling their bodies in a Costa Rica ghetto or enduring a self-empowering sobriety wilderness jaunt in the American South, Jones’s Unaccompanied Minors form microcosms animated by some of the best dialogue you’re likely to read all year.”
—Edmund White, author of Inside a Pearl
“Voices funny and true, tender and unrelentingly honest; writing that is spectacular without being showy; a scope that encompasses suburban high school lunchrooms, East Coast country clubs, and Central American houses of ill repute. Always, on every page, Unaccompanied Minors gives you young people searching, yearning, trying to find their way. This collection is a treasure.”
—Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children
“Jones is savvy. Where she is especially original and moving is in exposing the thin crevices through which the dim light of burgeoning sexuality peeps…enlightening and intriguing.”
—The Rumpus
The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia
“Jones takes us straight to the heart and to the resonating pulse of exotic pin dots most of us never have the nerve to explore. In writing both lyric and colloquial, she captures the voices that emerge in each landscape and setting, from the yips of spotted hyenas to the jangle of vendors in urban streets south of the border of the everyday. The Blind Masseuse is an expedition into the interior life of a smart, engaging American woman who makes us feel at home no matter how far from home she takes us.”
—Maria Flook, author of Invisible Eden
“Wonderful travel writing, in the line of Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. Alden Jones is humorous like Twain without being cynical; she treats all her amazing encounters and strangers with mucho love. She makes highly entertaining and fresh stories out of culture clash, traveling as an observant gringa, fluent in Spanish. She arrives at many deep insights about other cultures and ours, while transcending the form of travelogue into amazing and dramatic story-telling.”
—Josip Novakovich, Man Booker International Prize finalist, 2013
“Alden Jones’s refreshing humor, young perspective, and informed cultural awareness make The Blind Masseuse stand out from other travel memoirs. This is a smart and entertaining read.”
—Lucy Bledsoe, author of The Big Bang Symphony
