Biting the Apple - Softcover

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is a novelist and science writer. When she's not writing, she's sea kayaking in Alaska, backpacking in the Rockies, or backcountry skiing in the Sierras.

She attended Williams College and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and participated in both school's basketball programs.

Bledsoe has traveled extensively and to Antarctica three times. The first two times she went as a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Artists & Writers in Antarctica fellowship, living and working at McMurdo Station, Palmer Station, and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, as well as in field camps in the Transantarctic mountains. She spent time with scientists studying penguins, seals, global warming, and the Big Bang.

Her two newest books are The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic and How to Survive in Antarctica.

Bledsoe is the author of three novels: Sweat: Stories and a Novella, Working Parts, and This Wild Silence. She is also the author of five novels for children: The Big Bike Race, Tracks in the Snow (winner of the Parents Choice Gold Award), Cougar Canyon, Hoop Girlz (one of Booklist's "Top Ten Youth Sports Books" for 2002), and The Antarctic Scoop. Her novels have been translated into German and Japanese, and her stories into Dutch and Chinese.

Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award for Literature, and has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She's also won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities Youthgrant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Money for Women grant, a Puffin Foundation grant, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers in Antarctica Fellowships.

Bledsoe's work has been widely published in anthologies and periodicals, such as Ms.,
Newsday, Fiction International, ZYZZYVA, Bloom, Lodestar Quarterly, Girlfriends, Blithe House Quarterly, California Wild, and Northwest Literary Quarterly.

Her science writing includes CD-ROM scripts for National Geographic and The George Lucas Education Foundation, as well as curriculum for the SETI Institute's Voyages Through Time project.

Starred Review. Bledsoe's fourth novel delves deep into what happens when the construction of an image overtakes the living of a life. In high school in the early 1970s, Marianne Wade, estranged daughter of an itinerant preacher, shows a distinct talent for track. Her ability is developed for the Olympics by her coach (and husband and manager to-be) Nick Capelli, but when the U.S. boycotts the Moscow games, Marianne begins to drift, takes the name Eve Glass and eventually becomes a motivational author and speaker. Through Eve's reluctance to fully let go of Nick (after they divorce); her rebellion against her new manager's attempts to treat her as a product; her episodes of shoplifting and petty theft; the odd relationship she has with Joan, a female reporter she had a love affair with in high school; and her obsession with a poet, she becomes more than a once-promising athlete since fallen on hard times. With its emphasis on starting over, the novel juxtaposes prefabricated enlightenment and fake faith with real hope and one woman's authentic search to discover what matters. (July)
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