"Fanny Howe discusses The Needle’s Eye: Passing Through Youth"

A meditation on time, violence, and chance by “one of America’s most dazzling poets” (O, the Oprah Magazine)

Fanny Howe’s third book of nonfiction, The Needle’s Eye: Passing Through Youth, is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. Howe subverts the usual narrative chronology with stories of two boys who set out to find happiness in a fourteenth-century folktale; Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions; the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston; the poet George Oppen and the philosopher Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange; and the wild-child Brigid of Ireland. Focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved, The Needle’s Eye is a brilliant and deeply felt exploration of faith and terror, coincidence and perception, by a literary artist of profound moral intelligence, “recognized as one of the country’s least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers” (The Boston Globe).

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Fanny Howe’s previous book of poetry, Second Childhood, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her fiction was recently honored as a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. She lives in Massachusetts.