Anna Shapiro — Writer

Author of three novels, a collection of essays, and short pieces of literary journalism. Her first novel, The Right Bitch (Grove), a “willfully clever stream of consciousness” about a “New York rogue,” to quote Joy Press’s Village Voice review, was a Voice Choice and the subject of a New York & Co. interview on WNYC. Though set in the 1980s, it seems to have been before its time where gender is concerned: “Shapiro makes certain that The Right Bitch remains elusive, a polysexual text written by a woman in a man’s voice with a woman looking over his shoulder … fast, fluent, and funny.” Her next novel, Life and Love, Such as They Are (Simon & Schuster), “reads like a Feydeau farce,” according to Thomas Mallon in GQ, and “captures to a T the world of downtown New York … with a comic flair and a specificity that leave you a little turned on and smiling in recognition” (The New Yorker).

Her following book built on the opening of Life and Love (in which a woman models a meat loaf into the shape of her lover’s head, featured in Entertainment Weekly) in analyzing novels ranging from Tolstoy through Proust to Colette and James Cain for the way they use food to encapsulate major themes in each book (A Feast of Words: For Lovers of Food and Fiction, Norton). Francine Prose in People magazine called it “a literary tasting menu … haute cuisine for the body and the spirit.” About Shapiro’s next book, Living on Air (Soho Press), Kerry Fried, in Newsday, wrote, “Always, it is Anna Shapiro’s perfect balance, the knowledge and sharp sympathy that pervade her dialogue and description, that make ‘Living on Air’ such a piercing joy.”

Shapiro wrote brief reviews of fiction on a weekly basis for The New Yorker as well as long, signed pieces and had a monthly column of fiction reviews in The Observer (UK), also writing for journals ranging from Elle to The New York Times. The New York Review of Books published her exploration of her father’s work and the nature of life as an artist and a related review of the Whitney museum’s exhibit of socially conscious murals. Her reviews and short essays have appeared in a number of anthologies, including a piece in The Nation about automation and the disappearance of jobs.