Adjunct Assistant Professor and Writing alumna Hilary Leichter ’12 is set to launch her second book, Terrace Story (HarperCollins, 2023), a novel based on the National Magazine Award-winning story published in Harper’s in 2021.
Terrace Story tells the story, among others, of a family that lives in a cramped apartment in New York City. One night they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet, unfurling a mix of different stories about family, love, loss, and hope over one year, and capturing the ups and downs of city life in a raw and realistic way. The novel, a meditation on loss and how to go forward, asks how we nurture love when death is towering over us every instant.
Pulitzer Prize winning writer Hernan Diaz praised Leichter as “one of [the] most original novelists” of our time. “Step out onto the terrace, where space and time, cause and effect, and fiction and reality have been redefined and gorgeously subverted. Terrace Story isn’t a novel you merely read; it’s a book you inhabit,” he said. BOMB Magazine described the novel as a “sprawling, gutting romance” celebrating the multiple perspectives of the book. “That is the pleasure and heartbreak of reading Leichter’s work: the knowledge that sometimes stories have no beginning or end.”
Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary, which was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Temporary was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and named a best book of 2020 by NPR, Elle, Vulture, and Publishers Weekly. Hilary has published in The New Yorker, n+1, The New York Times, Conjunctions and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was the summer 2022 Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig.
