Man Alive!
All it takes is a quarter to change Owen Lerner’s life. When lightning strikes the coin he’s feeding into the parking meter, the pediatric psychiatrist survives, except that now he only wants to barbecue. The bolt of lightning that lifts Dr. Lerner into the air sends the entire Lerner clan into free fall, and Man Alive! follows along at that speed, capturing family-on-family pain with devastating humor and a rare generosity. This novel explores how much we are each allowed to change within a family—and without.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
Mary Kay Zuravleff's third novel, Man Alive!, was just published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Her earlier books, The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls, were also published by FSG. Among the honors she has received are the American Academy's Rosenthal Award and the James Jones First Novel Award, and she was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Mary Kay taught writing at American University, Johns Hopkins University, and George Mason University, and she has written and edited extensively for the Smithsonian Institution. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children. Mary Kay serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a cofounder of the D.C. Women Writers Group.