Molly Antopol

“It’s clear we’re in the hands of a master storyteller.” —Jesmyn Ward

“Not since Robert Stone has a writer so examined the nature of disillusionment and the ways in which newfound hope can crack the cement of failed dreams.” —Adam Johnson

“Antopol has an uncanny ability to get under her characters’ skins in the most intimate possible ways.” —Peter Orner

Molly Antopol is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow and current Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She’s a recipient of the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. Her debut story collection, The UnAmericans, was published by W.W. Norton in February 2014, and won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. The book was longlisted for the National Book Award in fiction and was a finalist for the PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the California Book Award, among others. One story from the collection, “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story,” won The O. Henry Prize for best short fiction of the year.

About The UnAmericans, The New York Times writes, “It’s one of the achievements of Antopol’s stories that her men and women seem to be questioning everything, all the time. Political awareness is a birthright for Antopol’s characters.” The book is an Indies Introduce Debut Authors and Indie Next pick. “[The UnAmericans] isn’t simply powerful and important,” writes novelist Jesmyn Ward says that, “it’s necessary.”

Chosen by Meg Wolizter as an NPR Best Book of 2014, Wolitzer praises The UnAmericans saying: “These stories reminded me of another era in short fiction, a time when Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Grace Paley were writing. The settings include Tel Aviv, Prague and Ukraine, and the characters are sometimes Israeli or Russian. Molly Antopol’s decision to spread out geographically allows her a way to take stock of the delicate connections between people in and out of couples and families. Sometimes the stories resemble miniature novels, rich and eventful and populated, and Antopol has an appealing, surprising tendency to keep going past the spot where you thought she was going to wrap the whole thing up.”

Antopol received her M.F.A. from Columbia University, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming on NPR’s This American Life, online at The New Yorker, and in One Story, Ecotone, The Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review Prize Stories, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She is also a writer-in-residence at the Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania. Recently, she has been the 2019 visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris. In 2017 she was the recipient the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin. And in 2016 she received the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University.

She lives in San Francisco, and is at work on a novel, The After Party, which will also be published by Norton.

Short Bio

Molly Antopol’s debut story collection, The UnAmericans, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. The book was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the National Jewish Book Award and the California Book Award, among others. She’s the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where she currently teaches. She lives in San Francisco, and is at work on a novel, The After Party, which will also be published by Norton.

Read What’s In Print

• Review of The UnAmericans — Jewish Book Council

• Interview with Molly Antopol — The Rumpus

• Review of The UnAmericans — TimeOut New York

• “The Trans-Generational Author” — Interview Magazine

• Molly Antopol Profile — Kirkus

• Interview with Molly Antopol — The Millions

• Interview with Molly Antopol — Switchback

• Interview with Molly Antopol — Fiction Writers Review

Listen to Audio

• Review of The UnAmericans — NPR’s All Things Considered

THE UNAMERICANS

“The Old World” (excerpt from story)

No one wants to listen to a man lament his solitary nights-myself included. Which is why, on an early fall morning four months after Gail left, when a woman breezed into my shop with a pinstriped skirt in her arms and said, “On what day this can be ready?” I didn’t write a receipt, tell her Tuesday and move on to the next customer. Instead I said, “Your accent. Russian?”

“Ukrainian.”

“The Jewel of the Baltic! I’ve read a lot about it,” I said. “The art, the food, those ancient fishing villages!” On and on I went -though I had not, in fact, read about it. I had, however, caught a television special once, but I remembered little more than twisted spires, dreary accordions, plates of pink fish, pocked and shiny.

“Ukraine,” she said slowly, “is not on the Baltic.” She had a wide pale face, full lips and short blond hair dyed the color of curry.

“Ah,” I said, and swallowed.

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