Binnie Kirshenbaum

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Binnie Kirshenbaum (born Yonkers, New York, 1964) is an American writer of both novels and short stories. Her work is most noted for its humorous and ribald prose which disguises the themes of human loneliness and sadness. Kirshenbaum attended Columbia University and Brooklyn College. She is the head of the fiction department at the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts. She has won the Critic's Choice Award twice and was selected as one of the Best Young American Novelists by Granta Magazine. Kirshenbaum was also a nominee for The National Jewish Book Award. Her newest novel, Greater than Love, will be published in 2009. Kirshenbaum resides in New York City and is married to the scientist Anthony Gidari.

1 Early life
2 Later Life and Works
3 List of Books
4 External links

[edit] Early life

Binnie Kirshenbaum was born in Yonkers in 1964. Her childhood was spent in affluent Westchester County where her father worked as a lawyer and her mother was a high school teacher. She has two brothers, one older and one younger. After graduating from high school, Kirshenbaum went to Yale where she stayed two years before transferring to Columbia University for its undergraduate writing program. She then got her graduate degree at Brooklyn College where she studied with Maureen Howard, who was instrumental in helping her with her career.

[edit] Later Life and Works

Kirshenbaum published her first story collection Married Life and Other True Adventures,in 1985, which was followed by the cult classic *On Mermaid Avenue.comthe adventures of two young women whose friendship becomes doomed when one decides to marry very badly. This book has earned a reputation as a cult classic among young women since it portrays the very best of freedom and youth and the very worst of marriage; however, this novel starts Kirshenbaum's on-going theme of loneliness, alienation, and sadness that prevails throughout her work.

Kirshenbaum followed On Mermaid Avenue with another short story collection History on a Personal Note.com in 1990. Some of these stories are interconnected, but all of the characters struggle with love, loss, and the historical ramifications of their lives. This collection is full of black humor, which examines how the personal intersects with the historic. In 1998, Kirshenbaum explored the territory of history and the personal again in her novel *Hester Among the Ruins.com . In this novel an American Jewish woman sets off to Germany to write a live biography about an ordinary German man. In the process, the two fall in love, but their love is tainted by a past of which they aren't even part of. In both the short story collection and the novel, characters are doomed by by global history, personal history, and ethnicity.

A Disturbance in One Place.com explores the alienation of a woman who seeks to find meaning through affairs that she, herself, finds meaningless. Not particularly religious, she also journeys in thought, if not deed, to her Judaic heritage. Overall, though the reader will laugh at the ribald and sometimes black humor, the book settles in to a cosmos where alienation, loneliness, and only vague meaning prevail.

Kirshenbaum's most disturbing and despairing novel, *An Almost Perfect Moment.com is, on the surface, at least, very funny. It is the story of Valentine, a peculiar Jewish teen who looks like the Virgin Mary and is enamored of the music and ritual of the Catholic Church. The other characters in this story range from lonely to loneliest and ultimately pin their hopes on Valentine. Unfortunately, Kirshenbaum has created a world where hope seems to be a farce, and loneliness and isolation are the most we can hope for.