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Robinson…has discovered a story with as much to do with America’s present as America’s past.”
– Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com
Author Photo
Roxana Robinson is the author of ten books - six novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books , two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland and Spain.
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Praise for Dawson’s Fall

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Taken as a whole, the…story reads as a reflection of America in the years after the Civil War, defined by reinvention, race, and the ideal of honor.”
– Washington Independent Review of Books
www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com
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A fascinating read, “Dawson’s Fall” illuminates the destructive antecedents some 150 years ago of racial tensions that remain with us today.”
– Portland Press Herald
www.pressherald.com
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How should a white writer write about whiteness? In no particular way. One sits with the truth, holds it, troubles it and writes as far into it as one’s pen will go. Robinson acknowledges that Frank Dawson ‘wrote to explain the world to itself’ and that, in the end, no explanation could suffice. Dawson’s Fall asks what truth means in an era when conviction matters more, and Roxana Robinson’s answer — that morality is friable — should make us sit up and tremble.”
– Katy Simpson Smith, New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Using far-flung sources and excruciating care, she creates the map; her novelist’s skills render it in 3-D. Few Americans may have an ancestry as acutely divergent across the Mason-Dixon Line as Robinson has, but the legacy of slavery and the Civil War is still being felt by our nation. Dawson’s Fall is a richly envisioned attempt to reconcile with that troubled history.”
– Carolyn Kellogg, Washington Post
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Robinson conjures an era when the South was a hair-trigger place, obsessed with lost privilege.”
– The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com
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Some set pieces, such as the Hamburg riot, are riveting, showing how a novelist can capture reality in a way that rouses a historian’s envy.”
– Harlan Greene, The Post and Courier
www.postandcourier.com
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Robinson uses lynchings, duels, and sexual assaults to shed light on populism and toxic masculinity…A stylish and contemplative…novel, considerate of facts but not burdened by them.”
– Kirkus, Starred Review
www.kirkusreviews.com