The Lost and Found and Other Stories (New York University Press, 1994)

Winner of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, this collection of tales is, as its title suggests, a sort of “lost and found” peopled with odd and vivid characters who are often alone and displaced, but whose world is one where the miraculous is ever lurking and possible.  The stories are inhabited by immigrants from Turkey, Algeria, Egypt and Chile; many live in Paris’ less salubrious quarters in dilapidated immigrant hotels, others in suburban America in the homes of the wealthy, and some in monasteries of Latin America, but what all these characters share is an experience of exile, interior or real, which they attempt to live out as a form of liberation.

Remedy (Portobello Books 2007)

Remedy is a satirical variation on the theme of the American in Paris. A modern-day and rather upside-down fairy tale, it recounts the amorous adventures and philosophical musings of Remedy O’Riley de Valdez, a quirky, thirty-something American woman working for an on-line fashion site.  Faithful to her name, she looks for remedies of all sorts and in all directions, from the columns of a woman’s magazine, to Catholicism, feng shui, belly dancing, diverse cultures and creeds and men and relationships.  Remedy’s mission is not only to meet her “prince,” but to reinvent the world around her, slyly turning life’s crude contradictions into more palatable paradoxes.
Remedy has been published by Feltrinelli Editore in Italian under the title Per Tutti i Santi and will be published in Russian by AST Publishers in Moscow.  Option rights for a film adaptation have been acquired by Portobello Pictures.

Patsy Boone (Editions de la Différence, September 2008)

Upon the advice of an overbooked Native American shaman in New York, Patsy Boone, a young American woman who hasn’t had her period in two years, sets off for Paris – because she has been reading Flaubert – to seek the help of a celebrated French shaman, M. Nez-Percé.  During this rather unorthodox treatment she retraces with humor and marvel the history of the United States and the great plains, the terrible conflicts between Native Americans and Settlers, while musing on her daily life in Paris amongst Parisians, her disputes with her gouty concierge, and her passion for tap dancing.

First novel written directly in French.