Alison Clement
"With Twenty Questions, Alison Clement has accomplished that rare feat of a literary page-turner. The prose is deceptively straightforward and the characters eerily ordinary and recognizable. Beneath a simple surface runs a complex and frightening subterranean story, one that continues to produce surprises and insights, the most alarming of which might be that this is every person's psychology, every town's fraught underside. This book satisfies at all levels."
OREGON BOOK AWARD judge, Antonya Nelson
"Twenty Questions peels away the façade of a happy marriage and shows the other wasteland beneath the lies… Such is the power of Clement's storytelling."
The Oregonian
"Clement's subtle prose rendors June's existenial pondering and anxious thoughts convincingly and the plot elements click ...."
Publisher's Weekly
"Touching, funny… Twenty Questions passes the test with an A."
BookPage
"Pretty Is As Pretty Does is that rare book that editors dream of finding. It is intelligent, funny, and engaging. I've read perhaps hundreds of manuscript that tried in vain to accomplish what Alison Clement does so effortlessly and so beautifully. In editing the work, I've read Pretty numerous times and have not tired of it and have even gleaned new elements and subtlety. Pretty is a melding of literary and mainstream fiction that is adored by readers like."
Barnes& Noble Discover Great New Writers selection
".. a tale of subtle complexity. Clement's unique voice, her keen sense of place, and her wonderful humor antimate her debut novel."
Matthew Roudane, editor South Atlantic Review
"Wildly entertaining." Booklist
"Deliciously mean." Susan, Wickstrom, Willamette Week
.
I'm the author of two novels, My short stories and essays have been published in The Sun, High Country News, Alaska Quarterly Review, Calyx, Salon and other places.
I'm currently working on an ethnography of writing, also known as a memoir. If you like, you can listen to its preface here: