Well-regarded and now widely read

For more than a decade Amy Bloom has been a well-regarded literary writer best known for an understated, emotionally wise debut, 1993’s National Book Award-nominated story collection “Come to Me.” She’s helped support herself by continuing a psychotherapy practice in Connecticut and teaching writing at Yale.

In the last few weeks, though, she’s jumped into a different league. Her new novel, “Away,” is an epic: a transatlantic, cross-country quest and historical novel wrapped up together.

Bloom, 54, is also now the creator of a new television show, “State of Mind,” which premiered in July on Lifetime.

Along with leaping onto various bestseller lists, “Away” has become one of the best reviewed novels of the year. “Alive with incident and unforgettable characters,” the New York Times wrote, “it sparkles and illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains.”

“It’s very nice,” Bloom says of the acclaim. “I assume the next one will be disastrous.”

But seriously, folks: From where she sits, Bloom doesn’t feel like she’s doing anything terribly different. “I don’t actually really think about that stuff that much while I’m writing,” she said midway through a book tour that brings her to town next week.

“I feel that writing and publishing are not the same things. I was just aware of trying to write the kind of book I was interested in reading, which meant a sort of modern 19th century novel.”

Though she allows: “I think my fear of overwriting, and my dislike of sentimentality, both of which strike me as good things, are also things to balance.”

What she was conscious of was setting the story in a very different location than her earlier stories and her first novel, “Love Invents Us,” set mostly in the more-or-less present. “Away” concerns a young Jewish woman, Lillian, who flees a Russian pogrom in 1924 and comes to New York. While working around the edges of the Yiddish theater, Lillian hears that her daughter, who she thought died in the slaughter, is alive and living in Siberia. The ‘20s setting shapes the book profoundly, though Bloom makes clear that people weren’t especially different then.

“The time was clearly different, but part of what I like about it was it was a very modern world,” she said. “In the ‘20s they had everything that we have except television and the computers. They had the telephone, they had radio, they had billboards, they had movies, they had gossip columns, they had celebrity endorsements, they had cars. . . . It only took 21 hours to get from New York to Chicago. It was really not the 19th century. Unless you were really poor, in which case it really was.”

Bloom did a lot of research but didn’t want to become one of those tiresome “period” writers. “It’s a question of, What details do you want to draw the reader to?” she said. “The fact that it’s set in a different time doesn’t give you license to endlessly point out all the things you’ve cleverly observed and would now like to share with the reader.”

Some of the book comes from her Jewish grandparents’ journey from Russia and environs.

“All I knew is that my mother’s mother started out with eight siblings and ended up in this country with three. And no one ever said anything about what happened to the other five. My grandmother, whose English was not great, divided the world into ‘nice’ and ‘not so nice.’ And what she would say was, ‘Life before 1915? Not so nice. Life after 1915? Nice.’ And that was it. There were no stories of any kind. . . . The silence was very interesting to me.”

Though the book covers lots of ground -- its heroine’s journey from Russia to New York, and then across the country and up through Alaska back to Russia -- it’s under 250 pages.

“A friend said it’s like a medicine ball,” Bloom said. “It’s not that big, but it’s dense.”

Bloom’s show, “State of Mind,” which is set among psychotherapists at a group practice in New Haven, Conn., brought Bloom to Los Angeles for most of the summer. The program is unusual for telling its stories from the shrink’s, rather than the patient’s, point of view.

“It’s all show and no tell, there’s no narrative sentence,” she says of writing for TV. “The camera is your narrator, and you better make friends with the editor, because that has a tremendous amount to do with the shaping of the narrative.”

She avoided some of the worst aspects of L.A. life. “I didn’t experience a lot of traffic, since I was usually at the studio by 6:30 or 7, and leaving about 11. So for me, L.A is a largely traffic-free area.”

Those 16-hour days that often come with a TV show in production, she said, make it hard to keep up with friendships or the news. “Which is why so much of television is as it is: short on relationships and short on understanding of the larger world.”

scott.timberg@latimes.com

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Amy Bloom

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Info: (626) 449-5320, www.vromansbookstore.com

Also

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Info: (800) 595-4849, www.skirball.org