[2] Her mother was a professor of child development and placed Shipstead into a program for "gifted" children based on an IQ test at five years old.
[3] Shipstead attended Harvard University and while there she considered becoming a writer for the first time after taking Zadie Smith's course on creative writing.
[8] It received mixed reviews, with the New York Times describing the prose as "unexceptional, subservient to the momentum of Shipstead’s schematic plot.
"[9] However, The Guardian praised it for "nimble writing barely misses a beat, any plot implausibility amply compensated for by her serious addressing of a devotion to artistic endeavour that crosses generations and captivates opposing individuals.
Many of the short stories had been previously published in journals such as Tin House and Virginia Quarterly Review in the decade leading up to the publication of Great Circle.