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I’m grateful to have received a 2022 Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Academy Award nominee Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone, Birdman, The Wire) read a story I wrote at a special Selected Shorts event, curated by Josh Radnor, on February 23. The recording will be broadcast on Selected Shorts.

I wrote one of the sixteen essays in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids,  edited by Meghan Daum, and forthcoming (March 31, 2015) from Picador. Of the collection, Publishers Weekly says, “Some entries are heart-wrenching—especially Elliott Holt’s ‘Just an Aunt’—while others are downright hilarious.”

Brooklyn Magazine’s “Map of the Best Book for Every State” includes You Are One of Them as the book that best represents Washington, D.C. 

Thanks, Time, for including me on a list with the amazing likes of Alice Munro, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Claire Messud, Rachel Kushner, and Zadie Smith. Esteemed company!

Mitzi Rapkin interviewed me for First Draft on Aspen Public Radio. It was a great conversation, even though I had a cold (you can hear how stuffed up I was!).

Flavorwire includes You Are One of Them on its list of the best debut novels of 2013.

You Are One of Them is one of the 7 finalists for the National Book Critics Circle’s first annual John Leonard Award for a first book.

The L.A. Review of Books review: “Elliott Holt’s fast, electrifying debut is as convincing and absorbing a portrait of post-Soviet Russia as you’ll read. But at its heart, it’s also about America.

You Are One of Them is ultimately about the way the world picks us: to be the ones with boobs, or not; to be the one with the crazy mom, or not; to be the one whose letter a Soviet leader reads, or not. It’s tempting to call Holt’s conclusions hopeful, because she does, in the end, upend these binaries, showing us how the boobless become beautiful, how the crazy mom outshines the apparently perfect robo-parents, and how having one’s letter picked over piles of others doesn’t mean what it seems. But Holt has more restraint than Jerry Bruckheimer, at least, and we don’t lose what we’ve gained along the way.

So much can go wrong. We can be ugly to our best friends, we can resent or even hate our parents, some of whom don’t even bother to spend time with us or know who we are. And at the highest levels of power, men can point ICBMs at each other, roping us all into an ever-darkening game. Spies can defect and people can be poisoned. There will always be conflict and chaos. Yet, at the heart of it all, what Holt wants us to remember is this, her final line: ‘We can destroy ourselves.'”

I interviewed my friend Laura van den Berg for Fiction Writers Review.

AdWeek interviewed me (on camera) about the differences between writing commercials and writing fiction.

October 3, 2013 is the U.K. publication date of You Are One of Them. Blackfriars Books, a digital imprint of Little, Brown, will publish the book in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. 

Reese Okyong Kwon interviewed me for The Millions.

The Toronto Star says: “Elliott Holt’s output prior to this terrific debut consisted of a number of short stories, one of which won the prestigious Pushcart Prize in 2011. For years she worked as a copywriter in glamour spots such as New York, London and Moscow. And while ad agencies rarely function as farm teams for the literary majors, the witty, suspenseful intelligence of You Are One of Them suggests Holt has what it takes to join the handful of successful novelists — Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie and Dorothy L. Sayers among them — who proved themselves exceptions to the rule.”

On May 30, 2013, Elliott Holt and Michael Cunningham discussed Holt’s novel at the Center for Fiction in New York. Watch the video here. 

Briefly noted in The New Yorker (July 29 issue): “Holt’s beguiling début reimagines the story of Samantha Smith, the ten-year-old American girl who, in 1983, started a correspondence with the Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov. In Holt’s novel, the Smith character, named Jennifer Jones, moves into a house across the street from the book’s narrator, Sarah Zuckerman. The two girls form an intense friendship that unravels when Jenny rises to celebrity after her letter to Andropov is published in Pravda. Jenny tours the Soviet Union as a good-will ambassador and then dies in a plane crash with her family. A decade later, Sarah travels to Yeltsin-era Moscow (sharply evoked as ‘a place of new money and ancient grudges’) to retrace her lost friend’s footsteps and investigate the possibility that Jenny may still be alive. Holt’s book, in which there is no difference between personal and political betrayal, vividly conjures the anxieties of the Cold War without ever lapsing into nostalgia.”

Brad Listi interviewed Elliott Holt for the excellent Other People podcast. 

You Are One of Them is on the long list; the short list of finalists will be announced in late August.

“Holt’s wonderful novel “You Are One of Them” beautifully compresses and expands time, place and the boundaries of the self.”

“Holt has found inventive ways to use language that suggests the porousness of identity, the correspondence between self and other, neighbor and foreigner, you and them. Her ingenuity brings distinction to this confident, crafty first novel.“

“This tenuousness practically sings in the book’s latter half, as a trip meant to reunite Sarah with an old friend drives home for her the quintessential alienation humans feel, as if the title could be a sentence uttered either by Sarah or her Russian acquaintances. No spoilers, here, don’t worry — but it wouldn’t make any difference if they were present, because the surprise of reading this book is in how closely it might remind you of what life is like, as you live it, all by yourself.”

You Are One of Them is a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

You Are One of Them was chosen as one of Amazon’s Ten Best Books of the Month for June.

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “It’s that ambiguity that lends the conclusion of You Are One of Them its power. The resolution to Holt’s novel brings together all of the elements raised in the preceding pages, from saber-rattling to childhood betrayals. It’s a dramatically satisfying ending that invokes those things that we can never know — and as such, it’s a reflection of a haunted period of history, of lessons learned in doublespeak that may well have rooted themselves too deeply in our collective minds for us to fully recover.”

I joined the New York Times Book Review podcast to talk about You Are One of Them, which was reviewed in the May 26th issue.

From The Plain Dealer: “The word ‘defect’ exemplifies our language’s weird elasticity. It’s the most active of verbs, connoting the choice to desert an old reality in favor of a new one. But as a noun its feel is passive, conjuring an object broken and robbed of worth.Both meanings are at play in Elliott Holt’s atmospheric debut novel, You Are One of Them.”

Thanks to The Masters Review for this: “You Are One of Them takes the reader on an in-depth exploration of friendship, the reliability of memories, and the maturity it takes to reconcile these feelings to a satisfying end. Perhaps what Holt so skillfully portrays is that our memories and the truths within those memories are constantly shifting. Much like the Cold War and Cold War propaganda, relying on an unreliable resource will only yield difficult answers. The journey Elliott Holt takes us on in You Are One of Them is a joy to read. Holt is a true talent, and I can’t wait to see more of her work.”

Elliott Holt on Samantha Smith, the girl who became famous for writing a letter to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, asking for peace.

Thanks to Micawbers, an independent bookstore in St. Paul, MN, for this kind endorsement: “Holt has put together a story that I think perfectly captures the angst and worry of children witnessing the Cold War arms race. Set in both Washington, D.C. and Russia, the book centers around a friendship between two young girls. As North Korea is currently trying to go off the rails and doing its peace talks with Dennis Rodman (defense item #1 of actual world events being totally nuts) this novel was a great reminder of what this kind of chatter can do to the minds of children. I read this book over the course of two or three days and immediately handed it to my wife who also cruised through it. It has a perfect balance of being a page-turner and very well-written.”

“It is hard not to throw bouquets at this book, or make it sound like the best thing since sliced bread.” Jason Rice was very kind in his review of You Are One of Them for Three Guys One Book.

Publishers Weekly on the story behind the book.

You Are One of Them is one of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2013 and tops their list of literary fiction.