MFA alum longlisted for the National Book Award

George Mason University alum Jessica Anthony, MFA Creative Writing ’04, was recently longlisted for the National Book Award for her newest novel, The Most. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding literary work by U.S. citizens and is awarded once a year.

In addition to The Most, Anthony is the author of The Convalescent (2009), winner of McSweeney’s inaugural Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award; Chopsticks (2012), a collaboration with designer Rodrigo Corral; and Enter the Aardvark (2020), which was a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and New American Writing, among other places.

In the interview below, Anthony reflects not only on the honors for her most recent book but also on her time at Mason.

National Book Award Longlist! Where were you when you heard the news, and what was the overriding emotion/response?

I had settled onto my couch here at my house in Portland, Maine, with a stack of papers to grade. Not quite ready to dive in, I picked up my phone, as people do these days. I opened Instagram and saw a message from my friend, the novelist Bruna Dantas Lobato, who won the National Book Award for Translation last year. I was stunned to learn the news. Elated and stunned. 

The Washington Post described The Most as “a smoldering, Cheeveresque mediation on mid-century, middle-class disappointment.” How would you describe it? And what was the genesis for the story?

The Washington Post's description is a good one. I would also call it a historical fiction that critiques historical fiction. Cheever could never write a character like Kathleen Beckett because in his career, he never cared to see her. I wanted to recreate the sensibility of a lost novel from the 1950s, but through a contemporaneous structure; a structure that calls attention to itself. I would call it the story of a day told twice. I would also call it a love story. 

This is your fourth book. How do you think that your work has changed over the course of the decade and a half since The Convalescent came out—and how has it changed since your days in the MFA program at Mason?

I wrote some of my favorite short stories at Mason, but I don't write many now. I'm not sure why—maybe because it takes me such an absurdly long time to write one? On the advice of Alan Cheuse, my incredible and beloved professor and mentor at Mason, I try to focus on a single project at a time. I give it everything.

Each of the books I've written are wildly different from one another in subject, tone, but every single fiction is an exploration into a country of our making. I like to travel to places strange to my experience. When I look back on my first novel, I never regret seeing in it that sense of adventure. 

How did the MFA program at George Mason help you in terms of craft or career?

My years at George Mason were the first in my life that anyone talked to me as though I was an artist; that the way I observed the world had meaning; that, in fact, there were people who wanted me to write, and write well. How to quantify the value of that gift? Whenever I saw Alan after graduation, he never asked "how are you?" Instead, he would look at me soberly and say: "How's the writing." It was never a question, always a statement. Alan, Steve [Goodwin], Susan [Shreve], and Dick [Bausch]—they each taught us, in their way, that a good story matters more than anything.  

What’s the last great book that you read? And what made it great?

Brian Brodeur, a poet who was in our class at George Mason, has published his fifth collection of poems called Some Problems with Autobiography, and I was utterly amazed by it. How can you make a sonnet, which creates awe and newness while familiarizing 21st-century life? Brodeur has done it.