"Beautifully executed... gripping... a multi-layered, immersive novel in which the atmosphere and history of Peru leap off the page."
“Impressively textured… a story with an activist’s righteous energy and a novelist’s psychological depth.” — The Los Angeles Times
“Fiery, probing... a deeply humane book, one that reminds us that the best questions are those that are both urgent and impossible to answer.” — The Forward
“The Gringa… raises an important question: Does fiction, particularly fiction that claims to be based on history, have any responsibilities at all vis-à-vis real people and their lives?” — The New York Review of Books
“Altschul’s ambitious and culturally aware novel is a captivating depiction of passion, disenchantment, and hope gone violently awry.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Psychologically rich and closely observed… A sensitive portrayal of the search for meaning in an unforgiving world.” — Kirkus
News
Read my essay about fatherhood and masculinity (a Longreads Editors’ Pick) in Esquire,
Read my account of hiking the Liechtenstein Trail (a Longreads Editors’ Pick) in AFAR
Listen to my short story “y = mx + b,” first published in Ploughshares, performed on Selected Shorts
The Gringa is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award
An interview on Colorado Public Radio
A podcast about The Gringa, from KPFA’s Bookwaves (full-length interview here)
The Los Angeles Times gives The Gringa a rave!
“Fiery, probing, deeply humane…” – read an interview in The Forward
A reading from The Gringa and a conversation with poet Darcie Dennigan, on Instagram Live
The Gringa is the Times of London’s “Thriller of the Month”
Listen to The Gringa playlist at Largehearted Boy
Recent Events (click to watch)
Fiction/Faction panel @ Jaipur Literature Festival
A Conversation with David Shields @ University Book Store, Seattle
Reading and Conversation with Melanie Abrams @ The Booksmith, San Francisco
Reading and Conversation with Nick Flynn @ Page 158 Books, Wake Forest, NC
A conversation about American (mis)behavior abroad, on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast
Virtual Book Launch @ McNally-Jackson Books, NYC
Stories of Resistance and Revolution @ Litquake on Lockdown
The Antibody Reading Series @ Virtual Book Channel
Music and literature @ Coffee with the Grahams
Rekindled! A conversation with Ellen Meeropol @ VBC
About the Author
Andrew Altschul is the author of three novels—The Gringa, Deus Ex Machina, and Lady Lazarus—and an O. Henry Prize-winning short-story writer. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Ucross Foundation, and the Fundación Valparaíso. He teaches at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins.
The Gringa
Leonora Gelb wants to make a difference. She left a life of privilege to fight poverty and oppression, but her ideals are tested when she falls in with revolutionaries…
Deus Ex Machina
On a distant island, reality show contestants battle for a slot on next week's episode. The network is desperate for ratings, but the producer is losing control…
Lady Lazarus
Who in the world is Calliope Bird Morath? Poet. Celebrity. Death Artist. Her father was an iconic punk-rocker whose suicide devastated the world…
“What every even slightly conscious American writer is trying to figure out right now is how to write about the state of America without clambering atop a soapbox…What might matter, what could constitute a real contribution, is to look very deeply at patterns of American thought and conscience and absence of same; to confront the various ways in which U.S. innocence and ‘idealism’ are in the service, finally, of detachment and terror; and to figure how and if there is a path out of global obliviousness. Such is the considerable achievement of Andrew Altschul’s ‘The Gringa.’”