Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR.org, theatlantic.com, The Millions, and other publications.
Her novel, Acceptance, was made into a television movie starring the hilarious Joan Cusack.
Coll is the recipient of multiple grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She works at Politics and Prose Bookstore and was the president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation for five years. She teaches occasional workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Coll's new novel is Word Salad.
Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:
My book club has been reading novels that have either won or been short-listed for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, which has been a great way to engage – or sometimes reengage—with books that I intended to read but that in many cases slipped off myVisit Susan Coll's website.radar. Our most recent selection was Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz. I’m embarrassed to say that I had not previously read Enright’s fiction and was very glad to have picked this up. It's a slim, elegant novel, written from the point of view of an unreliable and unlikeable narrator. Set in Dublin in 2009, the novel centers on an adulterous affair, which might sound reductive, but Enright manages to avoid the sorts of tropes one might expect with such a pat storyline. The writing is gorgeous and she throws a curveball by having a young child with health concerns bear witness to the badly behaving adults. There’s a delicious train wreck quality to the story that kept me turning the pages, as we watch the narrator deliberately blow up her own marriage and destroy another.
Coffee with a Canine: Susan Coll & Zoe.
The Page 69 Test: Acceptance.
The Page 69 Test: Beach Week.
The Page 69 Test: The Stager.
The Page 69 Test: Real Life and Other Fictions.
The Page 69 Test: The Literati.
The Page 69 Test: Word Salad.
--Marshal Zeringue
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