Stealing Faith

by Leora Skolkin-Smith

Allegra Gordon knew there was much she could learn from Faith Hale. From the moment she met the esteemed writer and feminist icon on the campus of New York's Abigail Stone College, Allegra understood that Faith would be a force in her life, one that would wrench the best work from her and encourage her to lay her soul bare. The relationship that evolved would simultaneously be the most liberating and most shattering Allegra ever encountered. And it would change both women in profound ways. From political rallies in the early seventies to soaring tributes at the turn of the twenty-first century, from confidences betrayed to liberties taken to freedoms denied, from a cottage in Maine to stone buildings in Manhattan to a farmhouse in Vermont, here is a story of women's lives unfurled and of a friendship at once impossible and eternal.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 6, 2024

About the author

Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel HYSTERA is the winner of this year's Global E-Books Award 2012.
Hystera is published by Fiction Studio Books, Lou Aronica, Publisher.
Ms. Skolkin-Smith was born in Manhattan in 1952, and spent her childhood between Pound Ridge, New York, and Israel, traveling with her family to her mother’s birthplace in Jerusalem every three years. She earned her BA and MFA and was awarded a teaching fellowship for graduate work, all at Sarah Lawrence.
Her first published novel, EDGES was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley's own imprint at Glad Day books. EDGES was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award by Grace Paley. Recently, her work has been chosen by Princeton University and the Department of the Humanities for their series: “Fertile Crescent Moon: Stories from the Middle East Diaspora.”
THE FRAGILE MISTRESS, a feature film based on EDGES, is currently in pre-production, scheduled to begin shooting on location in Jerusalem, Jordan, and New York, produced by Triboro Pictures, directed by Michael Gunther. http://www.thefragilemistress.com
Excerpts from HYSTERA were first published by Persea Books, and recently appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review. Recent publications include a piece from THE FRAGILE MISTRESS, which appeared in Guernica Magazine in 2010.
She was recently a panelist, at MAINE READS, The Haitian Cultural International Book Festival, The Miami International Book Fair, The Virginia Festival of the Book, and The National Women’s Association. She is currently a contributing editor to readysteadybook.com. and her critical essays have been published in The Washington Post, The National Book Critic’s Circle’s Critical Mass, Conversational Reading, the Quarterly Review, and other places.

Reviews

[Caroline Leavitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leora Skolkin-Smith's first novel, the excellent The Fragile Mistress, a love story set in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was first published by Grace Paley. Skolkin-Smith was also a cherished friend of Paley, who mentored her, supported her and advocated for her. Stealing Faith, is of course, fiction, but it is the story of a young writer and the older, famous writer who changes her life. Actually both their lives change in astonishing ways. Stealing Faith has the same gorgeous prose Skolkin-Smith is known for. It's moving, brilliant, and unlike anything I've read before.

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Stealing Faith" is a moving and yet brutal account of what happens when people you love, trust and amire betray you -- without wanting necessarily to do so. An honest chronic of the loss of innocence - in all ways possible --within the walls of a prestigious American university in the late sixties, "Stealing Faith" impresses the reader by its honesty and detached tone, which emphasizes the psychological destruction of the narrator, a creative writing female student. But the book is also the story of how to forgive and rebuild oneself, letting the scars become part of the self, in all their monstrosity, but also their strange beauty. Masterpiece.