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.
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