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Audrey Niffenegger

Born: 1963 in South Haven, Michigan
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Niffenegger's family moved to Evanston when she was very young. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University. She teaches at Columbia College and has also taught for the Newberry Library, Penland School of Craft and other institutions of higher learning. Niffenegger continues to reside in Chicago.

Biography: Niffenegger is a visual artist and writer. She was trained as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her MFA from Northwestern University's Department of Art Theory and Practice. Niffenegger has been making books by hand since the early 1980s. She has exhibited her artists books, prints, paintings, drawings and comics at Printworks Gallery in Chicago since 1987. Niffenegger is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Centre for Book and Paper Arts. She currently teaches writing courses that specialize in text-image relationships. She has also taught for the Newberry Library, Penland School of Craft and other institutions of higher learning. In addition to her international bestselling debut novel, ''The Time Traveler's Wife'', Niffenegger is the author of two illustrated novels, ''The Three Incestuous Sisters'' and ''The Adventuress''; which were books she had originally printed and bound by hand.


Awards:
  • Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories Illinois Reads Book Selection, Illinois Reading Council, 2024

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction; Illustrator

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers; Children

E-Mail: audrey@audreyniffenegger.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ANiffenegger/
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1875979/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AANiffenegger
Web: http://audreyniffenegger.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Niffenegger


Selected Titles

Awake in the Dream World: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger
ISBN: 157687639X OCLC:

powerHouse Books 2013

Otherworldly, provocative, and strange, Awake in the Dream World channels the looming, historical grimness of the classic fairy tale, illuminating the dichotomy between the real and imagined through the context of fantasy, and bringing to life a macabre ensemble of folkloric characters. Awake in the Dream World is a mid-career retrospective of artist and author Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife, bestselling novel turned feature film), reflecting her talent for cultivating a captivating narrative exclusively through pictures and her own confrontations with life, mortality, and magic. Niffenegger's fantastical body of work is reminiscent of renowned pen and ink predecessors such as Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Egon Schiele, Edward Dulac, and Horst Janssen, but with a brutally honest and unapologetically strange female perspective that touches upon the universal trials of life-death and decay, love, jealousy, redemption, and the inevitability of change. Her works on paper, lithographs, and aquatints reflect the often surreal narratives of her artist's books. Through self-portraiture, Niffenegger reveals her own self-assurance and whimsy alongside anxiety and loneliness, probing darker corners of the human heart and mind, often exploring the hopeless struggle with what Shakespeare called "this bloody tyrant, Time." Essays by Audrey Niffenegger, National Museum of Women in the Arts Curator of Book Arts Krystyna Wasserman, and Art Institute of Chicago Curator and School of the Art Institute Professor Mark Pascale explore the artist's influences and work. Published in conjunction with the June 21-November 10, 2013 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Bizarre Romance
ISBN: 1419728539 OCLC:

Abrams ComicArts 2018

Internationally bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, and graphic artist Eddie Campbell, of such seminal works as From Hell by Alan Moore, collaborate on a wonderfully bizarre collection that celebrates and satirizes love of all kinds. With 16 different stories told through illustrated prose or comic panels, the couple explores the idiosyncratic nature of relationships in a variety of genres from fractured fairy tales to historical fiction to paper dolls. With Niffenegger’s sharp, imaginative prose and Campbell’s diverse comic styles, Bizarre Romance is the debut collection by two of the most important storytellers of our time.

Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories
ISBN: 1501111191 OCLC:

Scribner 2015

Collected and introduced by the bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry—including her own fabulous new illustrations for each piece, and a new story by Niffenegger—this is a unique and haunting anthology of some of the best ghost stories of all time. From Edgar Allen Poe to Kelly Link, M.R. James to Neil Gaiman, H. H. Munro to Audrey Niffenegger herself, Ghostly reveals the evolution of the ghost story genre with tales going back to the eighteenth century and into the modern era, ranging across styles from Gothic Horror to Victorian, with a particular bent toward stories about haunting—haunted children, animals, houses. Every story is introduced by Audrey Niffenegger, an acclaimed master of the craft, with some words on its background and why she chose to include it. Niffenegger’s own story is, “A Secret Life With Cats.” Perfect for the classic and contemporary ghost story aficionado, this is a delightful volume, beautifully illustrated. Ghostly showcases the best of the best in the field, including Edith Wharton, P.G. Wodehouse, A.S. Byatt, Ray Bradbury, and so many more.

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel
ISBN: 1439165394 OCLC: 317923485

Scribner, New York : 2009.

When Elspeth Noblin dies, she leaves everything to the 20-year-old American twin daughters of her own long-estranged twin, Edie. Valentina and Julia, as enmeshed as Elspeth and Edie once were, move into Elspeth's London flat and through a series of developing relationships a crisis develops that could pull the twins apart.

Raven Girl
ISBN: 1419707264 OCLC: New York :

Harry N. Abrams New York : 2013

Once there was a Postman who fell in love with a Raven. So begins the tale of a postman who encounters a fledgling raven while on the edge of his route and decides to bring her home. The unlikely couple falls in love and conceives a child―an extraordinary raven girl trapped in a human body. The raven girl feels imprisoned by her arms and legs and covets wings and the ability to fly. Betwixt and between, she reluctantly grows into a young woman, until one day she meets an unorthodox doctor who is willing to change her. One of the world’s most beloved storytellers has crafted a dark fairy tale full of wonderment and longing. Complete with Audrey Niffenegger’s bewitching etchings and paintings, Raven Girl explores the bounds of transformation and possibility.

The Adventuress
ISBN: 081097052X OCLC: 62127885

Abrams Image, New York : 2006.

The author of the New York Times bestseller The Time Traveler's Wife returns with another evocative “novel in pictures, the much-anticipated follow-up to 2005’s The Three Incestuous Sisters. The Adventuress follows the dreamlike journey of an alchemist's daughter. After she is kidnapped by a lascivious baron, she turns herself into a moth and flees to the garden of a charming butterfly collector named Napoleon Bonaparte. The story of how the two become lovers, and how their affair ends in tragedy and transcendence, is told through Niffenegger's spare prose and haunting aquatint etchings. With a stunning and distinctive visual style reminiscent of the work of Edward Gorey, this gothic romance packs the emotional heft of the world's great fairy tales. It will delight fans of the author's previous works and enchant an entirely new legion of readers.

The Night Bookmobile
ISBN: 0810996170 OCLC: 505419578

Abrams ComicArts, New York : 2010.

Audrey Niffenegger, the New York Times bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, has crafted her first graphic novel after the success of her two critically acclaimed “novels-in-pictures.” First serialized as a weekly column in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, The Night Bookmobile tells the story of a wistful woman who one night encounters a mysterious disappearing library on wheels that contains every book she has ever read. Seeing her history and most intimate self in this library, she embarks on a search for the bookmobile. But her search turns into an obsession, as she longs to be reunited with her own collection and memories.The Night Bookmobile is a haunting tale of both transcendence and the passion for books, and features the evocative full-color pen-and-ink work of one of the world’s most beloved storytellers.

The Three Incestuous Sisters: An Illustrated Novel
ISBN: 0810959275 OCLC: 56793712

Harry N. Abrams, New York : 2005.

In this Gothic-style, adult fairy tale, Bettine, Ophile, and Clothilde live together in isolation near the sea, until the arrival of Paris, the lighthouse keeper's son, who profoundly affects each sister emotionally.

The Time Traveler's Wife
ISBN: 9781939126016 OCLC: 952576689

Audrey Niffenegger's innovative debut, The Time Traveler's Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's marriage and their passionate love for each other as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals--steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

 

 

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