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Location: United States

Member Since: Oct. 23, 2010

Smart Media New York

Publisher info

Smart Media New York publishes breakthrough independent authors who live in New York City.

Enter Alexandra Ares: creator and publisher of Manhattan Chronicles, she is a new award-winning novelist, screenwriter and playwright born in Bucharest and reborn in New York City in 1998.

Alexandra lives on the Upper East Side. Her trips to the East Village are for entertainment only and her forays on Craigslist are purely for research. Her works have been also published in Turkey and Europe where they spent over 20 weeks on the best selling lists and were featured in Elle, Cosmopolitan and on Radio and TV.

She is the author of the award-winning novels "My Life on Craigslist", "Dream Junkies" and "The Other Girl", and of the collection of essays "Manhattan Chronicles", recommended by Readers Favorite. She is now at work at a collection of short stories about European expats in New York, "Manhattan Stories."

Visit her websites at:

www.AlexandraAres.com
www.ManhattanChronicles.com

Novels by Alexandra Ares:

My Life on Craigslist
The Other Girl
Dream Junkies

Awards and Nominations:

Readers Favorite
Best Books USA from USA Book News
Book of the Year Award (BOTYA) from the ForeWord Reviews
Next Generation Indie Award

Recommended by:
Midwest Book Review
US Book Review
San Francisco Book Review
Publishers Weekly

Plays by Alexandra Ares
Waking Beauty

Smashwords Interview

Alexandra Ares, where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?

I like to joke that so far I’ve had 3 lives. One in communist Romania where I was born, one in the gold rush of post communist Romania, and one in the post 9/11 'race to the bottom' in Manhattan, New York; first life gray, second privileged, third both hard and fun as well as often insane.

I grew up in Bucharest, where my dad was (and still is) a genius comic playwright with an overbearing, larger than life personality. Like any rebellious daughter, I didn’t want to step into his footsteps, so I started a very early career in television. In 1998 I moved to New York, which brought a fundamental change to my life, and in 2005 I started writing in English, after an experience described in my first, semi-autobiographic novel Dream Junkies. Like any (re)birth, it wasn't easy... So I belong to the rare species of European born authors who are writing in English as a second language, like Ayn Rand, Nabokov or Conrad to mention just a few literary titans that I admire. There’s a special sensibility, that you either HATE (especially if you'd rather have your characters good, bad, fun, or strong in a predictable way) or LOVE (an intensity and angst that are quite unique),

When did you first start writing?

In Romanian, I started writing at the age of 13. My first short story was a SF called Stranded In the Past. My best friend from school read it and said, Alexandra I think you’ll become a writer. I was surprised. Later, my debut collection in Romania (short stories and plays) was published under the title Stranded in the Past. And for a long time, after I had moved to New York, I was stranded in the past, in my Romanian past. Only in 2005 I started writing in English.

Where to find Smart Media New York online

Website: http://www.alexandraares.com
Twitter: @AlexandraAres
Facebook: Facebook profile

Where to buy in print

http://www.amazon.com

Publisher of

Waking Beauty by Alexandra Ares

Price: $9.29 USD. Words: 16,940. Language: English. Published: April 29, 2011 by Smart Media New York. Categories: Fiction » Plays & Screenplays » European, Fiction » Plays & Screenplays » American

An original, dark, funny three act play, with a strong female lead, blending the European and American culture and angst. A modern tragedy, a social vaudeville, and indirect a political play with an absurd and neo-feminist touch, coming from the tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera, Wendy Wasserstein’s Heidi Chronicles and David Hare’s Amy’s View.

Back to profile overview

Smart Media New York's tag cloud

absurd accents beauty bertolt brecht crime david hare drama eastern europe female lead feminist gw bush love lust modern vaudeville new york bucharest radio revolution war wendy wasserstein young woman