| Lindsay Stern | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Genre: | Fiction |
| Alma Mater: | Amherst College, University of Iowa, Yale University |
Lindsay Stern is an American writer and essayist. She is the author of the novel The Study of Animal Languages and the novella Town of Shadows.[1]
Stern received a B.A. in English and Philosophy at Amherst College.[2] She graduated with an M.F.A in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop[3] and began a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University.[4]
Stern published Town of Shadows with Scrambler Books in 2012.[5] She wrote the book while at Amherst College.[6]
Her debut full-length novel, The Study of Animal Languages, was published by Viking in 2019.[7] It follows two professors in a New England campus who are married to each other.[8]
Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Stern’s brittle comedy of highfalutin intellectual theories evolves into a feeling portrait of a gifted man coming face to face with his limitations."[9] Publishers Weekly suggested in a mixed review that the "intellectually teeming prose makes for a thought-provoking novel, though it’s more successful asking questions such as, 'Can voles experience heartbreak?' than depicting people breaking each other’s hearts."[10]
Booklist called it a "jittery, intelligent. . . depiction of relationships in which the parties involved experience a distressing inability to communicate."[11] The New York Journal of Books wrote: "Though she often depends on facile academic stereotypes, Stern reveals the ways in which scientists may try to deploy objective methods, but are ultimately human."[12]
For Washington Independent Review of Books, "What pulls The Study of Animal Languages toward its unexpectedly satisfactory conclusion (though not a by-the-book happy ending) is a series of false steps that require Prue and Ivan to face inner truths that neither character had thought silently to themselves, let alone proclaimed aloud to each other."[13]
Stern writes for Smithsonian Magazine.[14]