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Delighted to find ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE on Barack Obama's list of favorite books of 2017.

Nice to see ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE on Publishers Weekly's Best Books 2017: Fiction list.

“In this excellent, emotionally wrenching novel in stories, the residents of Amgash, Ill., and the surrounding communities, who were offstage characters in My Name Is Lucy Barton, are given voice. ”

Glad to see ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE on the New York Times' list of 100 Notable Books of 2017.

“I really believe in the sentence. Every sentence has to have some heartbeat of life to it.”

“Always, I have wondered: What does it feel like to be another person? This question is the furnace behind my work. But when you write about people, you are writing about class. Time and place in history determine a great deal, and if you consider place to be a place in society, then that shapes a life, as well.”

Nice to see ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE here on the Guardian's 'Not the Booker prize' shortlist.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout discusses Louise Glück’s poem “Nostos�� and the powerful way literature can harbor recollection.

“Glück seems to be saying that childhood is the only constant, immutable thing, while everything that comes after that—“the rest,�� she says, our whole adult life—occurs in the shifty arena of memory. Our whole present tense takes place in the shadows of the original, pure impressions of childhood. ”

“Strout has an aesthetic as spare as the white Congregational church, where her father’s funeral was held. The dramatic turns are understated �� tone on tone �� but the characters are nearly bursting with feeling. One of the central agonies of their lives tends to be an inability to communicate their internal state. It’s as if they needed Strout as an interlocutor.”

“Omission is where you find what makes a writer a writer; it is in the silences where forgiveness and wisdom grow, and it is where Strout’s art flourishes. This new book pushes that endeavor even further.”