Hannah tinti and biography

Review of The Good Thief by Ron Charles (for the Washington Post Sunday, August 31, 2008)

It may be too quaint to imagine there are still families reading aloud together at night (so many Web sites, so little time), but if you're out there, consider Hannah Tinti's charming first novel.

When Benjamin and Ren arrive at the grim, aptly named town of North Umbrage, the story grows both more humorous and more ominous. What he wants most in the world, though, is a family, and slowly he cobbles together one that includes a friendly giant whose only talent is murdering people, a mysterious dwarf who lives on the roof, and a lonely deaf woman who yells at them constantly.

Once I had that boy and girl together, I wrote a paragraph for each of their backgrounds, and that included a description of the girl and her father clamming on the shore. The gun was her father's shadow.

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  She teaches creative writing at New York University’s MFA program and co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. He led his daughter into the woods behind their house and down into the ravine, where a stream rushed over mossy rocks before emptying out into the ocean.
  
  It was a clear day. "That hand of yours is going to open wallets faster than any gun," Benjamin brags as they set off into the forest looking for soft hearts.

  Did you start with Hawley and his daughter, Loo, in their current lives, or did you begin with the secrets of Hawley's past? She is now Executive Editor. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, winner of the The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award.

  

  That Tinti is the young co-founder and editor of super-hip One Story magazine makes the arrival of this old-fashioned adventure all the more surprising.

  But, of course, someone does come for him, just as he's always dreamed. His fingernails were lined with grease and his dark hair was always overgrown and tangled.

  There was a set of silver dueling pistols in a polished wooden case, won in a poker game in Arizona. But what's most enjoyable is watching Tinti draw all these crazy elements together with Ren's destiny. In 2009 she received the PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing and in 2014 One Story won the AWP Prize for Best Small Press.