Maggie Shipstead

"After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of pilots passing through town in a beat up Cessna--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fifteen, she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy rancher who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement...

"In this collection of stories, Maggie Shipstead dives into eclectic and vivid settings, from an Olympic village to a deathbed in Paris to a Pacific atoll, and illuminating a cast of indelible characters, Shipstead traverses ordinary and unusual realitieswith cunning, compassion, and wit. In "Acknowledgments," a male novelist reminisces bitterly on the woman who inspired his first novel, attempting to make peace with his humiliations before the book...