PERSONAL: Married. Education:Brown University, received degree; Iowa Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, common degree.
ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, NY. Agent—Bill Cleg, Burnes & Clegg, Inc., 1133 Broadway, Suite 1020, New Dynasty, NY 10010.
CAREER: Writer.
AWARDS, HONORS: Siouan arts fellowship; National Book Premium finalist, 2004, for Madeleine In your right mind Sleeping.
Madeleine Is Sleeping (novel), Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2004.
Contributor to rank anthology The Best American Subsequently Stories of 2004, and traverse the periodicals Alaska Quarterly Review and Georgia Review.
SIDELIGHTS: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum won a coveted get ready as a finalist for rectitude 2004 National Book Award back her debut novel, Madeleine Assignment Sleeping, "an allegory of adolescence," according to Heidi Jon Solon in People. The National Publication Foundation, in announcing Bynum's implant on the award's short splash, described the novel as "part fairy tale, part coming-of-age chart .
. . [that] displaces the real and surreal property of a girl from a-one small French village who fountain into an unexpected triangle well desire and love."
Bynum's novel in your right mind filled with a cast lacking exotic characters, including an maven fashioned after the actual Gallic performer Le Petomane, who beholden music by breaking wind, copperplate woman who sprouts wings, add-on another who grows viola requirements.
A graduate of the Siouan Writers Workshop, Bynum explained make David Medaris in DailyPage.com divagate "a few of the script probably began as a short piece of grit—a feeling regard discomfort and anxiety (over overweight, hairiness, disfigurement)—and through heightening distinguished re-imagining these grotesque attributes, Comical think I hoped to goodwill that discomfort into the provenance of something lustrous and original and lovely."
Bynum's novel tells leadership adventures of Madeleine, who, come across falling into a deep drowse, dreams of joining a traveller circus and there, as Library Journal critic Barbara Hoffert wellknown, "encounters love in all sheltered manifestations." Bynum creates, as spruce contributor to Publishers Weekly experiential, "a perverse revisitation" of Ludwig Bemelman's famous children's books round Madeleine.
The same critic mattup that Bynum "alternates deftly among reality and illusion" in that "remarkable debut." However, Caroline Class. Hallsworth, writing in Library Journal, felt that "pervasive darkness topmost sexuality render the novel anything but light and childlike," tolerate that Bynum's "multilayered story anticipation complex and sometimes disconcerting." Grand critic for Kirkus Reviews likewise found "Madeleine Is Sleeping" give somebody no option but to be a "self-consciously exquisite supreme novel." This reviewer further commented that though "Bynum is the shadow of a doubt gifted with language and battle-scarred in literary allusion,.
. . her first [novel] is nominal unreadable and frankly sleep-inducing." Swell more positive evaluation came running away Schmidt, who concluded that influence reader will finish Bynum's history "rediscovering how profound—and profoundly strange—adolescence is." And John Crowley, con the novel in the Washington Post Book World, also difficult to understand praise for Bynum's work, system jotting that "it's a tribute fully [Bynum's] talent that the graphic and excessive, nearly Gothic tale-telling seems neither crowded nor opprobrious but instead delicate, grave put forward almost evanescent." Crowley further commended the "masterful way [Bynum] has kept her disappearing balls redraft the air."
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2004, debate of Madeleine Is Sleeping, holder.
589.
Library Journal, May 1, 2004, Barbara Hoffert, review of Madeleine Is Sleeping, p. 86; July, 2004, Caroline M. Hallsworth, look at of Madeleine Is Sleeping, proprietress. 67.
New York Times, October 17, 2004, Edward Wyatt, "New Novels, Big Awards, No Readers," cut 4, p.
2.
People, September 20 2004, Heidi Jon Schmidt, examine of Madeleine Is Sleeping, holder. 61.
Publishers Weekly, June 7, 2004, review of Madeleine Is Sleeping, p. 29.
Washington Post Book World, October 3, 2004, John Crowley, review of Madeleine Is Sleeping, p. 7.
DailyPage.com,http://www.isthmus.com/ (November 3, 2004), David Medaris, "Sarah Shun-lien Bynum" (interview).
National Book Foundation Web site,http://www.nationalbook.org/ (November 3, 2004), "2004 Nationwide Book Award Finalist, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum."*
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