Julie Orringer
Julie Orringer is the author of the novel The Invisible Bridge and the award-winning short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is the winner of The Paris Review‘s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn.
MFOB FEATURED BOOK: The Flight Portfolio
1940. Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated American journalist, travels to Marseille carrying $3,000 and a list of imperiled Jewish artists and writers he hopes to rescue within a few weeks. Instead, he stays in France for 13 months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad leading over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall.
Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, impossible to put down, this is historical fiction of the very first order.
« Go to the full list of 2019 authors