When Granta magazine named Mona Simpson one of the best young American writers a few years ago, they identified her as a West Coast author. Yet Simpson was born and spent the first years of her life in Green Bay, Wisconsin, before moving to California with her mother, a move mirrored by the characters in her bestselling debut novel Anywhere but Here.

In her latest book, Mona Simpson returns to her hometown to tell the story of a girl who grows up in Green Bay... and stays. What happens when you plumb the depths of a small town, stay-put life? We'll find out today when we talk to Mona Simpson about her novella Off Keck Road, which also happens to be the inaugural book for our new book club, Talking Volumes.

About the author
Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1957; when she was 10, her parents separated and she moved with her mother to California. She has said about the question of autobiography in her work, "What I'd finally say about truth and autobiography is that all writers are probably trying to get at some core truth of life, at some configuration that is enduring and truthful. I just haven't found the truth to be my vehicle."

After getting her B.A. in creative writing at Berkeley, she did an M.F.A. at Columbia, where she began work on Anywhere But Here. Upon finishing her M.F.A. she worked for several years as an editor at the Paris Review. She was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and has won several prestigious awards, including the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim grant, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a grant from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Foundation. Her novels have been translated into fourteen languages.

Since 1988 she has taught at Bard College, where she is the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor of Languages and Literature. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Richard Appel, and their two children, Gabriel and Grace.