Bee Season

Name: Bee Season
ISBN: 9780385498807

A Novel

Myla Goldberg

WINNER OF THE EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT AWARD
WINNER OF THE HAROLD U. RIBALOW PRIZE

Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness. In this altered reality, Saul inducts her into his hallowed study and lavishes upon her the attention previously reserved for Aaron, who in his displacement embarks upon a lone quest for spiritual fulfillment. When Miriam's secret life triggers a familial explosion, it is Eliza who must order the chaos.

Myla Goldberg's keen eye for detail brings Eliza's journey to three-dimensional life. As she rises from classroom obscurity to the blinding lights and outsized expectations of the National Bee, Eliza's small pains and large joys are finely wrought and deeply felt.

Not merely a coming-of-age story, Goldberg's first novel delicately examines the unraveling fabric of one family. The outcome of this tale is as startling and unconventional as her prose, which wields its metaphors sharply and rings with maturity. The work of a lyrical and gifted storyteller, Bee Season marks the arrival of an extraordinarily talented new writer.

"Bee Season is a profound delight, an amazement, a beauty, and is, I hope, a book of the longest of seasons." —Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World and The Book of Ruth

"Myla Goldberg's Bee Season is a bittersweet coming-of-age in which wise little Eliza Naumann's quirky passion for spelling bees unites and divides her family while revealing universal truths about the often crippling pain of love." —Martha McPhee, author of Bright Angel Time

"There is such joy and pain thrumming inside Myla Goldberg's spelling bees! She delicately captures one family's spinning out by concentrating equally on the beauty and the despair. Bee Season is a heartbreaking first novel." —Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

"In a story told with unique delicacy and brave inventiveness, a young girl, innocent and all-knowing, learns how much there is to lose, and what it takes to win." —Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle

About the Author

Myla Goldberg is an American novelist best known for her 2000 debut, Bee Season, a story of a young girl’s rise through the world of spelling bees and the unraveling of her family’s spiritual and emotional life. The novel became an international bestseller, was translated into more than a dozen languages, and was adapted into a 2005 feature film starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche.

Born in Maryland and raised in Washington, D.C., Goldberg studied at Oberlin College, where she earned a degree in Russian and Spanish. She later lived in Prague and Chicago, and she now makes her home in Brooklyn, New York.

Her subsequent books explore memory, community, and the ways individuals are shaped by larger events. Wickett’s Remedy (2005) follows a Boston woman during the 1918 influenza epidemic. The False Friend (2010) examines a woman confronting a childhood incident long buried in memory. Feast Your Eyes (2019), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, tells the story of a fictional mid-century photographer through the pages of a museum exhibition catalog. She is also the author of the children’s book Catching the Moon and the Mardi Gras-themed novella Time’s Magpie, a portrait of Prague.

Goldberg’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Believer, and Salon, and her fiction has earned numerous honors, including the Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Bee Season.