Pamela Erens is the author of three novels for adults, a novel for tweens/young teens, and a volume of nonfiction.
Her most recent novel for adults, Eleven Hours (Tin House), is the gripping story of a woman in labor and the nurse who attends her. Eleven Hours was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The New Yorker, Kirkus, Literary Hub, Entropy, and the Irish Independent. It received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal and was a Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week. The novel was described by the New York Times as "an indelible portrait of two women coming to terms with the desire, fear, crushing losses and fragile joys that have carved their lives … Erens beautifully evokes [labor's] insistent rhythms and protective deliriums." The Boston Globe wrote: "Pamela Erens achieves the extraordinary: a visceral story about an intensely painful experience that manages to be an intense pleasure to read.”
Publishers Weekly named Erens’s second novel, The Virgins (Tin House), one of the best boarding school books of all time. Literary Hub includes it on its list of “The 60 Best Campus Novels from the Last 100 Years.” The story of three teenagers at an elite New England boarding school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, The Virgins grapples with class, ethnicity, envy, and the joy and terror of sexual awakening. John Irving in the New York Times called the novel “devastating … flawlessly executed and irrefutably true.” It was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award, a New York Times Book Review and Chicago Tribune Editors' Choice, and a Best Book of the Year at The New Yorker, The New Republic, Library Journal, and Salon.
Erens’s debut novel, The Understory, is set in New York City and a Buddhist monastery in rural Vermont. Both a mystery and a psychological study, it reveals that repression and self-expression can be equally destructive. Ex-lawyer Jack Gorse walls off his inner life with elaborate rituals and routines, until a threatened eviction and an attraction to a near stranger lead to the dramatic dissolution of the existence he's known. The novel was the winner of the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
Matasha (IgKids), Erens’s novel for readers ages 10 to 14, takes place in Chicago in the 1970s and follows a sixth grader as she negotiates family breakup, friendship betrayals, and the need for growth hormone treatment. The novel received a starred pre-publication review from Kirkus, which wrote that it “beautifully renders the slow-motion alchemy of growing up; mesmerizing and memorable.” Meg Wolitzer’s review in the New York Times called Matasha “thoroughly winning” and stated that “the many pleasures of this novel include its empathy and poker-faced wit, and the charms of its main character.”
Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life, Erens’s most recent book, is a nonfiction volume for Ig Publishing’s Bookmarked series. Written during the Covid-19 pandemic (and published on Middlemarch’s 150th anniversary), it explores how George Eliot’s masterpiece shaped Erens over the decades as both a person and a writer, and bolstered her during a difficult year. Publishers Weekly called it “a delightful mix of memoir and literary criticism …original and surprising.” Author Claire Messud wrote: “This short book is filled with wisdom.”
Erens’s short fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in a wide variety of literary, cultural, and mainstream publications, including The New York Times, Slate, Vogue, Elle, Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Astra, Tin House, and The Millions, and in the anthologies Visiting Hours, The House That Made Me, and Why I Like This Story. Her piece “Crave” received a Notable Essay citation in Best American Essays 2016. Erens has written about Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Leonard Cohen, media coverage of women’s issues, and teens and feminism.
The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wesleyan Writers Conference, Erens also received the fourth annual 2017 Maplewood Literary Award, previously won by Paul Auster and Dan Barry.
Erens has taught or lectured at Middlebury College, Tin House, Wesleyan Writers Workshop, Centenary College, The Center for Fiction, and Siena College, and has been a visiting writer at the University of Chicago, St. Lawrence University, and Colby College. Erens also works as a freelance editor of literary fiction and nonfiction (see Editorial Services) and is a certified yoga instructor.
Top photo: Kathryn Huang