About Courtney Allison

Courtney Allison is a senior publicist with Vintage/Anchor Books. She writes in her spare time and lives in Brooklyn.

January 11, 2013

Ayana Mathis’ The Twelve Tribes of Hattie: A Stirring Portrait of Family, Loss, and Endurance

Oprah's Book Club 2.0 pick, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, is a moving family saga starting in the 1920s that traces the lives and struggles of a determined mother and her nine children.

December 13, 2012

On the Subtly Stunning Work of Alice Munro’s Dear Life

Munro's stories somehow exist on two sides of a road: on one side, there’s light and beauty in simple things; and on the other, darkness is waiting for you just around the bend. They are deceptively simple, yet contain so much in each line.

November 12, 2012

One Lass, One Borough, Countless Reasons to Love Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn

Toibin's novel is as much a tale of one Irish emigrant as it is a look at the changing landscape of the borough of Brooklyn in the 1950s.

July 19, 2012

Middle-Aged Women Gone Wild? Trouble, a Novel by Kate Christensen

In Trouble, Kate Christensen delivers a meditation on complicated female friendships and romantic relationships, set amid the hedonism of Mexico City.

March 16, 2012

Dysfunction as an Artform: Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang

Tolstoy wrote, 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, what about the dysfunctional ones? Where do they fall on the Tolstoy spectrum? It's hard to imagine a family quite like The Family Fang, who give dysfunction new meaning in the hilarious and clever novel about family and artistic ambition from Kevin Wilson

November 19, 2011

A Murakami Primer: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

With the widely publicized release of 1Q84, it’s worth taking a look back at Haruki Murakami’s earlier works. Let's start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a rabbit-hole into Murakami’s world. It’s kind of like "Lost." But in book form. And weirder. Think raining fish.