Avigayl Sharp is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. A former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an MFA graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she now makes her debut with Offseason, a novel as intellectually fearless as it is emotionally unflinching.
Offseason, which was longlisted for the 2026 First Novel Prize, follows a fiercely observant yet deeply unreliable narrator teaching at an elite girls’ boarding school, where obsessive lectures, messy entanglements, and unresolved trauma blur the line between memory and self-mythology. By turns darkly funny, provocative, and psychologically incisive, the novel examines the stories we tell ourselves about pain, identity, and whether art or love can ever rewrite the past.
We asked Sharp to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
At some point in my childhood my father read the entirety of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo aloud to my mother, sister, and me. It must have taken ages. A feat of readerly care. Did his jaw get tired? I was very preoccupied with the handsome musketeers.
Brian Jacques’s Redwall series was important to me. I wanted to be a hedgehog. This was not funny at all, I remember crying horribly one afternoon when I realized it wouldn’t happen, at least not in this life.
What book helped you through puberty?
Nothing can help you. Though what immediately comes to mind is that American Girl puberty book, The Care and Keeping of You, which included a drawing of maturing breasts. This did not help me, but it did show me breasts.
I recently read an excellent set of Alberto Moravia novellas about puberty, the disintegrating terrors of sexuality, death drive, other stuff; my edition is titled Two Adolescents. The novellas (and adolescents) in question are Agostino and Luca. Agostino has been reissued by NYRB, and is probably the better book, but I have a soft spot for Luca, about a neurotic teenage boy who vomits against a train and generally rejects the injunction to live.
I love Moravia and I love the first line of his bio on my hardcover: “Born of moderately wealthy parents, Alberto Moravia suffered years of illness which prevented any formal education.”
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Maybe Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. But it’s hard to know what a book would have meant to me at a different time.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I am bad at writing lists. They make me feel at once overexcited and sick! But I will try anyway: James Salter’s Light Years, Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, the stories of Leonard Michaels, Gwendolyn Brook’s Maud Martha, Kathryn Scanlan’s The Dominant Animal, Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais, Ágota Kristóf’s Notebook trilogy, Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, Proust’s Swann’s Way, Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, I have to stop.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye, Fanny Howe’s Nod, Nabokov’s Pnin, Fran Ross’s Oreo, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, the novels of W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, Kafka, Dickens, many more.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I am rereading Middlemarch and thought this was a spontaneous decision, then realized it’s probably actually because it was at the top of the Guardian’s recent 100 best novels list. Oh well. I love Casaubon.
I’m in a loosely defined book club with two of my oldest friends, and we are slowly reading Volume I of Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance. It is an astonishing novel and if you have any interest at all in left politics and art, I think you should read it.