At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is the story of a twelve-year-old Parisian Jewish girl in World War II France, living “in hiding” as a Catholic orphan with a family in a small village.

When Danielle Marton’s father is killed during the early days of the German Occupation, her mother sends her to live in a quiet farming town near Limoges in Vichy France. Now called Marie-Jeanne Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the truth of what’s happened to her family and her country with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she’s bitter about being left behind by her mother, and horrified at having to milk the cow and memorize Catholic prayers for church. But as the years pass and the Occupation worsens, Danielle finds it easier to suppress her former life entirely, and Marie-Jeanne becomes less and less of an act. By the time she’s fifteen and there is talk amongst the now divided town of an Allied invasion, not only has Danielle lost the memories of her father’s face and the smell of her mother’s perfume, but her very self, transforming into a strict Catholic and an anti-Semitic, fervent disciple of fascism.

“Sends us to the dusk that borders the familiar and the wild, the known and the unknown. It’s where our beliefs and suspicions cast dark shadows over our lives. And of course, the lives of others.” - New York Times Editors’ Choice and Recommended Reading

“Brilliant, timely and chilling.” - PEOPLE magazine, a Best New Book

“Ison is unflinching in her depiction of the self-inflicted corruption that replaces the character's moral core with a twisted version of Christianity, brilliantly illustrating the epigraph from Solzhenitsyn: ‘To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good’.” - Kirkus, starred review

About the Author:

Tara Ison is the author of the novels The List (Scribner),  A Child out of Alcatraz (Faber & Faber, Inc.), a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Rockaway (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press), featured as one of the "Best Books of Summer" in O, The Oprah Magazine, July 2013. Her essay collection, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, Winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award for Best Creative Nonfiction, and her short story collection Ball, were both published in 2015 by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press.

Her short fiction, essays, poetry and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, BOMB, O, The Oprah Magazine, Salon, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Nerve, Black Clock, TriQuarterly, PMS: poemmemoirstory, Publisher's Weekly, The Week magazine, The Mississippi Review, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous anthologies. She is also the co-writer of the cult movie Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

She is the recipient of 2020 and 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a 2008 COLA Individual Artist Grant, as well as multiple Yaddo residencies, fellowships at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, and l’Ancienne Auberge in France, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International Study, a Brandeis National Women's Committee Award, a Thurber House Fiction Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, the Simon Blattner Fellowship from Northwestern University, and a California Arts Council Artists' Fellowship Award. Ison received her MFA in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College. She has taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College, Antioch University Los Angeles, and UC Riverside Palm Desert's MFA in Creative Writing program. She is currently Professor of Fiction at Arizona State University.

Tara will be joined in coversation by Jonathan Kirsch, an author, book reviewer and publishing attorney based in Los Angeles. He is the author of 13 books, a longtime book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, and a speaker on topics of interest to authors, publishers and readers at universities, libraries, book festivals, churches and synagogues, and other venue throughout the United States.

This program is part of a month-long bookfair at Barnes & Noble The Grove. A percentage of sales from this program benefit the Museum.

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