Judith Freeman Books

“L.A.’s a Strange Place”: On Judith Freeman’s “MacArthur Park”

Los Angeles Review of books • By Tom Nolan

THE MERCURIAL NATURE and tenuous persistence over decades of the friendship between two young women, Verna and Jolene, raised in the 1960s in the same rural town in Utah, and their problematic love, at different times, for the same gifted, emotionally isolated man, Vincent, are the threads tying together Judith Freeman’s bracing, engrossing, tough, and tender new novel, MacArthur Park, much of which is set in Los Angeles from 1984 into the present century… Read more here

Essays – Reviews – Interviews

Limberlost Review 2022

December 21, 2022

Limberlost Review 2022 Edition Featuring an interview with Judith Freeman

THE CRUCIBLE OF FRIENDSHIP – Audio

December 9, 2022

THE CRUCIBLE OF FRIENDSHIP “THE CRUCIBLE OF FRIENDSHIP:” A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JUDITH FREEMAN AND TERESA JORDAN from Zion Canyon Mesa – November 07, 2022 “THE CRUCIBLE OF FRIENDSHIP:” A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JUDITH FREEMAN AND TERESA JORDAN Zion Canyon Mesa November 07, 2022 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a friend is “one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy.

Next Avenue – A Chat

December 29, 2021

A Chat With 2 Creative Superstars in Their 70s –Novelist Judith Freeman and her husband, photographer Anthony Hernandez, on their work, their lives and their loves – By M.G. Lord / Published December 2021 – Next Avenue The narrator of Judith Freeman’s new novel, “MacArthur Park,” has a lot in common with Freeman, 75. She is a prominent writer (author

MacArthur Park – Los Angeles Review of Books

December 4, 2021

“L.A.’s a Strange Place”: On Judith Freeman’s “MacArthur Park” December 2, 2021 • Los Angeles Review of books • By Tom Nolan THE MERCURIAL NATURE and tenuous persistence over decades of the friendship between two young women, Verna and Jolene, raised in the 1960s in the same rural town in Utah, and their problematic love, at different times, for the same

MacArthur Park – Alta Review

October 18, 2021

My Brilliant Friend By Heather Scott Partington, Alta Small towns can lend themselves to oversimplification. You stay, you stagnate; you leave, you flourish. But Judith Freeman—who has made a career excavating the nuances of her small-town-Utah upbringing—has bigger ideas about what it can mean to be from a family-values state or to discover yourself anew if you depart. Neither is

The Kings Bookstore Interview – Salt Lake City October 14, 2021

October 15, 2021

Watch replay of MacArthur Park book discussion at The Kings Bookstore in Salt Lake City October 14, 2021 Watch the replay of MacArthur Park book discussion at The Kings Bookstore in Salt Lake City October 14, 2021 – Here.

Go to the Essays page here.

Judith Freeman is the author of the following works of fiction: Family Attractions, The Chinchilla Farm, A Desert of Pure Feeling, Red Water, Set for Life, the nonfiction book: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved, and her memoir: The Latter Days.

Her newest novel, MacArthur Park, was released October 12, 2021.

MacArthur Park

A captivating, emotionally taut, beautifully written story about the complexities of a friendship between two women—and how it shapes and reshapes, both of their lives.

Read an excerpt here

Praise for MacArthur Park

“Judith Freeman has long been one of our wisest and wiliest radicals. She’s never written a book more daring than MacArthur Park, an audacious novel that is several books in one: a revealing piece of auto-fiction, a story about an alter-ego female friendship, a portrait of a tricky marriage, a vivid road trip along little known Western highways, a debate between different visions of art (and womanhood!), and a rumination on the importance of finding somewhere to call home. As scrupulous and beautifully observed as all her work, this is one of those books that gets better and better as you go along.”
— John Powers, Critic at Large, Fresh Air with Terry Gross

“[MacArthur Park] . . . a spellbinding, exquisitely written new novel about a long marriage and a longer, difficult friendship, stands as proof that the examined life is well worth the telling. This is a book that a young novelist, no matter how dazzling, could never produce: MacArthur Park is emotionally mature, steeped in experience, and luminous from a lifetime of paying fierce, close attention to the world and its maddening humans. A beauty of a book.”
— Michelle Huneven, author of Blame

Praise for the earlier works

“A spare and elegiac melody master who accurately captures the heart and heartache of the modern romantic dilemma‚ Freeman’s eye is mesmerizing and merciless.”
— The Los Angeles Times

“Freeman writes with an authority that can only be earned through solitude. A Desert of Pure Feeling honors the interior spaces of the human heart, what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.”
— Terry Tempest Williams

“Once again, as she did so brilliantly in The Chinchilla Farm, Judith Freeman takes on a voyage both outward and within the soul; her characters are so fully realized, that landscape so vivid, the prose so fine, that A Desert of Pure Feeling lives on long after you reach the end.”
— Abraham Verghese

“Judith Freeman is one of the finest writers of our generation.”
— Walter Mosley

“This elegant, stirring book plumbs a great mystery, one hidden, from even Chandler’s many devoted readers, in plain sight. Freeman’s book is a meditation on marr iage, a persuasive biographical and literary study, and best of all, one of those rare books, like Nicholson Baker’s U and I or Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, where one writer’s study of another takes the form of a confessional fugue on the writing act itself.”
— Jonathan Lethem (on The Long Embrace)