About the Author
Tracy Robert, a native of Southern California, holds an MFA and has taught writing for over three decades. She won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize for fiction (novella), was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and has been published in various periodicals and anthologies, notably Forever Sisters (Pocket Books) and When Last on the Mountain (Holy Cow! Press). A co-founder of Around the Block Writers Collaborative, she facilitates writing retreats in Jamaica, Ireland, Italy and Bali. Flashcards and The Curse of Ambrosia is her debut book, winner of the Many Voices Project Prize at New Rivers Press.
Praise for Flashcards and The Curse of Ambrosia
These two connected novellas are filled with insight and wit as Tracy Robert reveals a dysfunctional family through the eyes of a child, and then many years later, the dysfunctional world through the eyes of that child’s best friend, now an elderly woman. Her book is both a cautionary tale and a captivating celebration of friendship.
–Louis Sachar, author of Holes, Newbery Medal, National Book Award
Alice Munro has said that the whole purpose of fiction is to be sad and funny at the same time. These unforgettable narratives succeed brilliantly on both sides of the equation. Whether depicting the classic heated follies of adolescence or the chilling new territory of near-future old age, Tracy Robert creates a memorably intense world of words. Enter if you dare.
–Elizabeth Searle, author of My Body to You, Iowa Short Fiction Award
Robert’s characters come painfully of age in the suburban paradise of Southern California. Then, as if Ray Bradbury decided Holden Caulfield deserved an old age sequel, we meet them again as octogenarians in a dystopian future. But forget the comparison. This uncanny pairing is Robert’s own along with prose so graceful and insightful I want to quote from page after page.
–Diane Lefer, author of California Transit: Stories, Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
The young people in Flashcards are bright, quick of wit, and know they are not being prepared for the pain life promises to bring. Decades older in The Curse of Ambrosia, the characters are bound to each other in a new set of vulnerabilities. It’s dignity they salvage from the dystopian decay enveloping them.
–Mack Faith, author of The Warrior’s Gift, AWP Novel Prize