Writing alumna Elysha Chang ’11 has just released her debut novel titled A Quitter’s Paradise. The book is an inaugural publication of a new imprint created by actress Sarah Jessica Parker, SJP Lit. The novel, an NPR Critics Summer Pick and a Michelle Obama's Reach Higher Summer Reading List Pick, explores grief without leaving out comic hijinks that keep the narrative energetic and lively.
Main character Eleanor drops out of her neuroscience PhD program to work in her husband's lab, conducting unauthorized research on mice. Still, she’s keeping secrets from her husband and keeps ignoring the fact that her mother is dead. “But what else is she supposed to do?” asks the book. “What shape can grief take when you didn’t understand the person you’ve lost?”
Author Kia Corthron described Chang’s storytelling in The New York Times Book Review as “beautifully subtle, often studded with sublime wit.” Parker described A Quitter’s Paradise as a “glorious, pondering, heartbreaking, extremely funny, very special book.
“In Eleanor and her family,” Parker continued, “Elysha Chang has created captivating characters, who continuously surprised, delighted, and intrigued me—so much so that I didn't want to leave them. The stories of their lives are at once intimate and universally resonant. It's truly the perfect inaugural book for SJP Lit and I couldn't be more honored to be working with the extraordinarily talented Elysha Chang.”
Elysha Chang is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn, and has taught creative writing at Blue Stoop Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University. She has received fellowships from the Center for Fiction and Kundiman. Her short works have been published in Center for Fiction Magazine, Fence, GQ, The Rumpus, and others.
