Budnitz, Judy 1973-

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Budnitz, Judy 1973-

PERSONAL:

Born April 24, 1973, in Newton, MA; daughter of Mark (a law professor) and Paula (a social worker) Budnitz; married; children: one son. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1995; New York University, M.F.A., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA. Agent—Leigh Feldman, Darhansoff, Verrill & Feldman Agency, 179 Franklin St., New York, NY 10013.

CAREER:

Novelist, short-story writer, educator, and cartoonist. Village Voice, New York, NY, cartoonist, 1996—. Residency, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, NJ; Princeton University, Council of the Humanities Fellow, 2005.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and Orange Prize shortlist, both for If I Told You Once; O. Henry Award; Rona Jaffe Foundation grant; Lannan Foundation grant; National Endowment for the Arts grant.

WRITINGS:

Flying Leap (short stories), Picador (New York, NY), 1998.

If I Told You Once (novel), Picador USA (New York, NY), 1999.

Nice Big American Baby (short stories), Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals and literary magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper's, Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney's.

SIDELIGHTS:

Though Judy Budnitz is perhaps best known for her cartoons in the Village Voice, she is also a published novelist and short-story writer whose works has appeared in prominent literary magazines such as McSweeney's, Paris Review, and the New Yorker. Flying Leap, her first collection of short stories, saw print in 1998 and contains twenty-three works of short fiction. The book was generally well received by reviewers. Among the tales in Flying Leap that have been singled out by critics is "Guilt," in which a young, physically fit man is gradually persuaded by his friends and family to donate his heart to his dying mother. His mother's doctor has told him that he will be able to live for a time without the essential organ and his relatives constantly remind him of how his mother persevered in carrying him to term. A Publishers Weekly critic declared "Guilt" to be "savagely funny."

Another story in Budnitz's collection, "Hundred-Pound Baby," explores the world as seen through the eyes of a boy named Nick who is abandoned by his father. A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised Budnitz's skill in portraying the world from a child's perspective. Flying Leap also includes stories titled "Train," "Herschel," "Yellville," "Dog Days," and "Directions." "Train" describes the lives of several people riding the New York subway. "Herschel" is the story of an old man who makes babies out of bread dough, while "Yellville" explores class differences by dropping a rural Arkansas teen named Russell into a middle-class American family.

"Dog Days" takes place after present-day societal standards have collapsed and a man in a dog suit attempts to survive by taking up residence on a family's porch. Gradually, because of his excellent impressions of dog behavior, the family begins to treat the man as a dog, giving him scraps of food on which he lives. But as even the scraps run out, the family recalls their knowledge of foreign cultures in which dog is an acceptable meat for the table. "Directions" concerns the meeting of several different characters who get lost in a large city and wind up in an old map shop operated by God. According to a critic for Kirkus Reviews, "each of the characters gets the help he or she deserves."

The reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote that Flying Leap, as is the case with other "first collections … could have sustained a final pruning," and asserted that Budnitz's fictional worlds, for the most part, are so good they "demand a visit." Eleanor J. Bader in Library Journal reported that the "often surreal stories" of the collection "are explicitly feminist and pro-working class." A Kirkus Reviews critic praised Budnitz's "audacity and originality" and "precise lyrical passages," and concluded by calling the collection "mordantly funny."

If I Told You Once is Budnitz's debut novel. The story "singes itself artfully into the imagination with its hard-edged, folktale-influenced exploration of the fate of four generations of women in Eastern Europe and America," observed a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Recognizing the bleak, hardscrabble future that awaits her if she stays, Ilana decides to flee the hardships of her small Eastern European village. Though World War I rages and the surrounding area is plagued with bandits and wolves that walk on their hind legs, Ilana escapes and is helped by Baba, a healer and possible witch. Soon, she meets Schmuel, who becomes her lover. The two eventually make their way to America, where they begin raising their family, but the supernatural forces that surrounded them in their homeland have come along as well, haunting them in their new home. The generational story follows Ilana's daughter, Sashie; Sashie's daughter, Mara; and Sashie's son's daughter, Nomie. As they tell their tragic stories and recount the travails of the men in their lives, fantasy and reality intermingle. Though Sashie and Mara have been unable to resist the forces arrayed against them, Nomie begins to understand the predicament, and with her great-grandmother Ilana works to break the multigenerational cycle of trouble and tragedy. Library Journal reviewer Dianna Moeller called the book a "dark, wickedly funny, and poignant first novel," and noted that Budnitz demonstrates an "original and instantly appealing voice." The Publishers Weekly contributor concluded that "the novel has a haunting power."

In her second collection of short stories, Nice Big American Baby, Budnitz offers "twelve tales edging toward the surreal yet grounded in nitty-gritty details of domesticity," remarked a Kirkus Reviews contributor. In "Saving Face," an imprisoned woman must prove that she is not actually the much-hated prime minister of the dictatorship that devastated her embattled country. The narrator of "The Kindest Cut" discovers what is apparently the Civil War-era journal of a battlefield surgeon harboring an obsession with severed limbs. In the world of "Sales," door-to-door salesmen are herded and penned like animals, kept in unlocked pens from which they are too docile to escape. And, in the three-part "Where We Come From," a woman is desperate to give birth to her child in the United States, where she will produce a "nice big American baby." She is so determined that she holds the child within her for years, while she struggles to successfully cross the border and stay in America. When her son is finally born, he emerges a bewildered, already growing child. Every story in the collection "tops the one before it," wrote Joanna Solomon in Kliatt. The reviewer added that Budnitz writes with a "delicate, quiet sense of humor, and her characters are well developed and fascinating."

"At her best, Budnitz achieves the brilliant creepiness and frisson of Shirley Jackson," commented Donna Seaman in a review of Nice Big American Baby for Booklist. She "writes stories that are wildly imaginative, frequently thought-provoking, and occasionally maddening," commented Tome Perrotta in the New York Times Book Review. "These bizarre and masterfully crafted stories will thrill readers of literary fiction who hunger for an innovative American voice," remarked a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. In assessing the book, Plough shares reviewer Fred Leebron noted that nearly "every story both surpasses and defeats the reader's expectations." The Kirkus Reviews critic summed up: "Budnitz shows major talent in her creation of a distinctive fictional world, ambiguous and complex."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 1, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 938.

Entertainment Weekly, February 11, 2005, Gillian Flynn, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 69.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1997, review of Flying Leap, p. 1722; December 1, 2004, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 1101.

Kliatt, September, 2006, Joanna Solomon, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 37.

Library Journal, November 1, 1997, Eleanor J. Bader, review of Flying Leap, p. 118; August, 1999, Dianna Moeller, review of If I Told You Once, p. 134.

Mother Jones, January-February, 2005, Michelle Chihara, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 84.

New Yorker, December 27, 1999, review of If I Told You Once, p. 137.

New York Times Book Review, December 24, 2000, review of If I Told You Once, p. 22; February 20, 2005, Tom Perrotta, "Absolutely Fabulist," review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 8.

People, March 7, 2005, Lisa Kay Greissinger, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 54.

Ploughshares, spring, 2005, Fred Leebron, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 209.

Publishers Weekly, October 27, 1997, review of Flying Leap, p. 52; September 6, 1999, review of If I Told You Once, p. 80; December 6, 2004, review of Nice Big American Baby, p. 41.

Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 2000, Molly McGrann, review of If I Told You Once, p. 27.

Village Voice, February 4, 2005, Joy Press, "Out on a Limb," review of Nice Big American Baby.

Writer's Digest, December, 1999, Brad Crawford, "Judy Budnitz's Absurd Stories," p. 10.