""From page one, Amphibians is the work of an extraordinary talent. How shrewd and compelling these stories are, as they range from Maine to New York to Japan to the Emirates and back. Their remarkable gift is to show us - wisely and sharply - the crucial contradictions of feeling in whatever unfolds, from passing encounters to long-held ties." " - - JOAN SILBER, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Improvement and 2019 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize judge. Amphibians invites further contemplation of female physicality--what it means to reside in a female form. An amphibious aircraft crashes in Maine, a young girl skinny-dips with her elders, a distraught cruise ship dancer boards a water taxi in Grenada, and travelers to Dubai and Abu Dhabi long for familiar oceans; back in New England, small-town artists try to smudge out their tedium with seaside transgressions. Amphibians celebrates home in a cross-cultural way, and the sensation of feeling not quite right in one's own skin, on land and near water, at home and abroad.
About the Author Lara Tupper is the author of Off Island, a novel inspired by Paul Gauguin's strange marriage (Encircle, January 2020), and A Thousand and One Nights (Harcourt, 2007, and Untreed Reads, 2015), an autobiographical novel about singers at sea. Her prose was runner-up for the 2019 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and has appeared in Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak (Harper Perennial), The Believer, Nowhere Magazine, The Ghost Story, Dogwood Journal, Epiphany, Zone 3 and other literary magazines. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she taught at Rutgers University for many years and now presents writing workshops and retreats in Massachusetts. She is also a jazz vocalist; her latest album is This Dance.
