Alena Graedon was born in Durham, North Carolina, and is a graduate of Carolina Friends School, Brown University, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has worked at Columbia, Knopf, and the PEN American Center. The Word Exchange, her first novel, was completed with the help of fellowships at several artist colonies, including The MacDowell Colony, The Ucross Foundation, and Yaddo. It is being translated into eight languages. Her nonfiction has been published in The Believer magazine, and in French translation in Le Believer. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. 
The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon
[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]
When I started listening to Alena Graedon’s The Word Exchange on audiobook (read by Tavia Gilbert and Paul Michael Garcia), I was bowled over. The sheer beauty of Graedon’s language, the book’s inventive dictionary structure, its references to Alice in Wonderland,
Read More
I was reading along with no trouble suspending disbelief until I got to "internet influencers!" And then I thought, "Well,…
I recently stumbled upon the topic of hard science fiction novels, by reading a comment somewhere referring to Greg Egan's…
This story, possibly altered who I would become and showed me that my imagination wasn't a burden. I think i…
I have been bombarded by ads for this lately, just in the last week. Now I feel like I've seen…
Hi Grace, I'm the director of the behavioral neuroscience program at the University of North Florida, so I teach and…