Julia May Jonas Books in Order

Julia May Jonas grew up in New Jersey and headed to New York University planning to be an actor. Once she got there, she realized she wanted a bigger hand in making theater, not just performing in it. She moved into the Experimental Theatre Wing, where movement, text, and staging could all work together.

That shift seems to have stuck.

Jonas came to writing through theater, not through the usual image of a novelist alone at a desk. She has said she came from a dance background, and that early mix of choreography, found text, and devised performance shaped the way she thinks about scenes. Even in prose, you can feel that sense of motion. People enter charged spaces, say too much or not enough, and keep talking until something uncomfortable rises to the surface.

After NYU, she earned an MFA in playwriting at Columbia, where she studied with Charles Mee. She later founded the theater company Nellie Tinder and built a body of work that moved between writing, directing, and performance. She has also taught theater at Skidmore College and New York University, which helps explain why classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and other argument-filled institutions feel so alive in her work.

Her plays came first. Works like Evelyn, Emily Climbs, Your Own Personal Exegesis, Problems Between Sisters, and A Woman Among Women show her interest in women under pressure, formal experiments, and stories that ask hard questions without rushing to tidy answers. There is often humor in the middle of the discomfort, along with a real interest in how people behave when they feel cornered.

Then the pandemic opened a different door.

Jonas had tried fiction before, but when theater shut down she finally had the time and quiet to stay with a novel. The seed of Vladimir came from an earlier play, but once she started writing in the voice of its unnamed professor narrator, she knew the story needed prose. A novel could hold the private spirals, self-justifications, vanity, rage, and desire that make the book so alive.

Vladimir follows an English professor whose husband is under investigation for relationships with former students, just as she becomes obsessed with a younger writer newly arrived on campus. It is a campus novel, but not a cozy one. Much of its charge comes from the slippery voice, the dark comedy, and the uneasy mix of desire, power, and self-delusion. The book later became a Netflix adaptation, with Jonas adapting her own work for the screen.

Across page and stage, she seems drawn to people in the middle of change. Desire matters in her work, but so do shame, ambition, performance, power, and the stories people tell themselves to make life feel manageable. Her characters are often smart, articulate, and badly mistaken about at least one important thing. That is part of what makes them interesting.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family, and her career still carries both halves of her creative life. She writes for the page, but she also thinks like a theater maker, attentive to rhythm, bodies, pauses, and the odd comedy of people trying to explain themselves. If you start with Vladimir, you will meet all of that at once: the sharp intelligence, the unease, the humor, and the fascination with what people want, and what wanting can do to them.