“Written with a deep and wide-ranging compassion that is rare these days, Yours, Jean is a mesmerizingly beautiful novel.”
―ANDRE DUBUS III, author of House of Sand and Fog
About Lee
Lee Martin is the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of The Bright Forever. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms., The Best American Essays, The Best American Mystery Stories, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, among others. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. A native Midwesterner, he teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University.
About Yours, Jean
“When she refused me,” Charlie says at his trial. “Well, I had that gun. What else was I to do?”
Lawrenceville, Illinois, 1952: Jean De Belle, the new high school librarian, is eager to begin the next phase of her young life after breaking off her engagement to Charlie Camplain. She has no way of knowing that in a few short hours, Charlie will arrive at the school, intent on convincing her to take back his ring.
Also by Lee
Praise for Lee
“Martin has written a not-to-be-missed masterwork..."
—BOOKLIST Starred Review, on The Mutual UFO Network
“Lee Martin has long been one of my favorite writers of fiction and memoir, and now he's one of my favorite writers of advice about the writer's craft. Everyone who writes, or wants to, should read this wise and inspiring book."
—DAVID JAUSS, author of On Writing Fiction, on Telling Stories
“. . .Mr. Martin is a top-notch craftsman. . ."
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, on Break the Skin
“Written in the clearest prose, working back and forth over its complex story, and told in the dark, desperate, vivid voices of its various speakers, [The Bright Forever] holds you spellbound to the end, to its final, sad revelations."
—KENT HARUF, author of Eventide and Plainsong, on The Bright Forever
Latest Blog Post
The peonies are late this year. Here we are, Memorial Day weekend, and the buds have yet to open. When I was a boy, my mother made arrangements from peonies and irises in coffee cans anchored with gravel in their bottoms, and we drove from country cemetery to country cemetery, leaving those flowers on the…