Malena Watrous is the author of the novel “If You Follow Me” (Harper Perennial).
“Japan seems to be a particularly difficult place to sort yourself out if you are a sensitive, rules-averse American woman with a flexible sexuality and a penchant for getting into trouble, like the narrator of Malena Watrous’ smart, comic first novel, ‘If You Follow Me,’” said the New York Times. “But fortunately for the rest of us, calamity borne with a good sense of humor often turns into a great story.”
Malena’s stories and essays have appeared in The Believer, GlimmerTrain, Salon, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review and elsewhere. She contributes regular book reviews to the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times.
She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (on a Truman Capote Fellowship). In 2002, she was the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, followed by a Jones Lectureship. She now works for Stanford as a head instructor in the Online Writer’s Workshop.
She lives with her family in San Francisco.
Visit her online at www.malenawatrous.com.
