I’m thrilled to share that the audiobook for Dreams Under Glass will release Fall 2024, and you’ll be able to purchase a copy through all major platforms or borrow one through your public library. Sound was a very important part of the composition of this book, both because I wanted it to sound “New York-y” in a way that felt homey to me and because I worked on it as a Jack Straw Writing Fellow in 2015, a program that trains writers for performance and voice recording. (You’ll see via the Jack Straw link that back then the work-in-progress was simply titled Paralegal. Titles are hard!) I am not the narrator of this audiobook—a professional narrator is—and I can’t wait to listen to their interpretation of my novel. Huzzah!
I was very happy to learn that my essay “Boiled Boot,” which appeared in the spring 2022 issue of The Fiddlehead, is listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick and Robert Atwan. Thanks to Liz Prato for letting me know and many thanks to Rowan McCandless and The Fiddlehead for the publication and nomination! This essay is part of an in-progress collection on food and cultural memory. Stay tuned for a new essay coming out in Orion in a few weeks!
Happy first book birthday to my second book baby, Dreams Under Glass! I am so grateful for the love this book has received from readers, bookstores, and book reviewers. Thank you for buying, reading, reviewing, suggesting your library obtain a copy--it means so much to me!
Thank you to the fantastic independent bookstores carrying my second book baby on their shelves:
In Chicago: Exile in Bookville, Women & Children First Bookstore, RoscoeBooks, & The Understudy Coffee and Books.
In Seattle: Elliott Bay Book Company, Third Place Books, & Queen Anne Book Company.
Of course, thank you to my fantastic publisher, Lanternfish Press! You are all such a joy! More exciting news to come... In the meantime, some highlights from the past year in the pictures below.
Will you be at #AWP23 in Seattle? Come by the Lanternfish Press table in the book fair (#432) and say hi! I’ll be signing books on Friday, March 10 from 1-2 pm.
I have a personal essay in Newsweek today. It’s about a time in my life I’ve thought about a lot and written about just a little. I think parenting and turning 40 has pushed me along toward fully facing this experience.
Here’s how the essay begins:
The tobacco executive's son, I told my maternal grandfather on the phone from the hospital, would receive as a college graduation present a pied-a-terre in any city he wished. He was deciding between Paris and New York. My grandfather—raised in a poor shtetl in Romania, a prisoner of the Iron Guard at 17—let out a distant sigh.
It was the summer of 2001. I'd completed my first year at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and was an in-patient at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington, D.C. with a mysterious infection that doctors in my hometown of New York City had not been able to treat.
Lilith's first-ever book, Frankly Feminist, a curated collection of 40+ short stories from 45+ years of publications is officially out today from Brandeis University Press. This groundbreaking Jewish feminist short story collection, I am honored to say, includes my story “Street of the Deported,” which won first place in Lilith’s 2017 fiction contest. I love how “Street of the Deported” came out soon after my first novel Daughters of the Air came out and how this anthology is now being released the week after my second novel Dreams Under Glass is released: coincidence or something cosmic? Buy Frankly Feminist today from your favorite local bookstore!
My dilated eye after an eye check up in 2019, superimposed with a picture of signed book plates.
I am honored to have a personal essay online in Poets & Writers Magazine today, in conjunction with the launch of Dreams Under Glass. Here’s how “Vision Loss and the Ekphrastic Novelist” begins:
“I am a visual writer,” I had have often thought, before glitches and blobs and little flickering spots invaded my field of vision, before I came have come to doubt what flits in my periphery. I mean, I still do think of myself this way. I haven’t lost my eyesight, yet. And, I have my memory. But faced with two separate causes of potential vision loss, I must reconsider this identity, which has been integral to my mode of creating.
In 2012, two days after I thought what would become Daughters of the Air was finished, I started writing what would become Dreams Under Glass. Ten+ years and many drafts later, it is out in the world! Thank you so much to those of you who pre-ordered the book. If you'd like to help me get the word out, here are some things you can do:
Join me at the launch party at Exile in Bookville in downtown Chicago on Thursday at 7 pm. I’ll be in conversation with Rebecca Makkai! RSVP here for this free event. Or join me at one of my upcoming events around the country. Bring friends!
Buy the book at an independent bookstore to show booksellers enthusiasm for the book and support all the great work booksellers do.
Review the book on Goodreads, Powell’s, Amazon (you can review without purchasing there), Storygraph, LibraryThing, your personal blog or wherever reviews are shared.
Request your library purchase a copy.
Suggest it to your book club. I will be happy to join a discussion over Zoom if you would enjoy that!
Tell friends who read literary fiction, like a bit of dark humor, like Joseph Cornell or other surreal artists, stories set in New York City, or about struggling artists, or are interested in stories of the financial crisis of 2008 or the Bernie Madoff scandal.
Let me know if you'd like me to read at your reading series or come talk to your students or would like to adopt the book for a course.
Send me photos of you with the book and I will post it on Instagram! Or tag me, and I will happily repost. Tag the bookstore where you bought the book too!
Of course, these are all good things to do for any and all books out in the world that you wish to support. Thank you so much for championing literature!
I am so excited to share that you can now pre-order my second novel Dreams Under Glass. Pre-orders through Lanternfish Press will include a signed book plate; they’re also offering a bundle of both of my novels for $32. I would be thrilled, also, if you supported your local independent bookstore! Two lovely independent bookstores where I have events planned so far: Exile in Bookville in Chicago, where I will launch on September 29 in conversation with Rebecca Makkai, and Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, where I will be in conversation with Maya Sonenberg on November 3. If you’d like to stay in the loop about other events, you can sign up for my monthly newsletter here.
My essay "Boiled Boot" appears in the spring issue of The Fiddlehead. The essay explores intergenerational trauma, Charlie Chaplin's film The Gold Rush, the documentary "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe," and more. Here are the first two pages:
You can order a copy of the issue here. Many thanks to Creative Nonfiction Editor Rowan McCandless and everyone at The Fiddlehead!
I'm honored to have my short story, "Street of the Deported," included in Lilith Magazine's forthcoming anthology, Frankly Feminist (Brandeis University Press, November 2022), collecting 45 years of Jewish feminist fiction published in the magazine. My story won first prize in their 2017 contest and is included in the anthology's section on war. The collection is edited by Susan Weidman Schneider and Yona Zeldis McDonough and includes a forward by Anita Diamant. You can pre-order the book now. You can also add it your Goodreads. I am so looking forward to reading all of the other stories in the anthology!
I am delighted to have a pair of short fairy tales in Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, out now from Scablands Books! This beautiful foil-stamped anthology, edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller, features an incredible roster of Pacific Northwest authors, such as Gary Copeland Lilley, Rick Barot, Shawn Vestal, Tess Gallagher, Ruth Joffre, Nicola Griffith, Kate Lebo, Elissa Washuta, and Lucia Perillo, to name just a handful, and has some wonderful illustrations as well—you can preview a couple of them, including one from my story "Moss Child," here. You can pick up a copy directly from Scablands Books, or at Atticus, Auntie's, From Here, and Wishing Tree Books in Spokane. If you're based in the Pacific Northwest, your local library might like to know about it! Here is the "Suggest a Title" form for Seattle Public Library; many library systems have similar forms.
I'm delighted to share that my short story "Hinges," published in Gordon Square Review last November, was nominated for the Best of the Net. Many thanks to Prose Editor Nardine Taleb for the nomination! You can see the list of nominees here and check out their work here. Hooray!
I'm excited to have two fairy tales in Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, a Scablands Books anthology edited by Spokane-based superheroes Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller. The (foil-stamped!) book releases November 2 (perfect season to cozy up with a book while it's drippy outside!), but discounted pre-orders are now available. Sharma shared a snippet of one of my tales on Twitter here. It's an honor to be in the same book with Elissa Washuta, Ruth Joffre, and so many other talented writers.
I am so very delighted to share that I've just signed a contract with Lanternfish Press for my second novel, to be published sometime in 2022. Some of you following this blog may be familiar with bits and bobs from the book, which for many years had the working title Paralegal, and which tells the story of a diorama artist working as a paralegal during the economic crisis of 2008, in the same building in which the Bernie Madoff scandal explodes. (Binnie, the protagonist, is influenced by the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, hence the choice in art for this post. This particular collage also been my laptop wallpaper for ages...) The project received early support from 4Culture and the Jack Straw Writing Program, and it's so exciting to shepherd it on toward existence in the world!
ETA: Here is the official announcement from Lanternfish Press!
I'm happy to have new fiction in The Capra Review, and I love the art selected for the piece, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, which is tangentially part of the story. (Just for fun, I chose a different unicorn piece for this blog post.) Other art mentioned in the story include Greco-Roman sculpture, Piet Mondrian's abstractions, and Martha Graham's choreography.
In a way, "The Samoyed" is a companion piece to my story "Old Boyfriends," which appeared in Propeller Magazine in December 2013. Both stories started out as structural "imitations" of Chekhov stories, "Old Boyfriends" using "Gusev" as a starting point and "The Samoyed" using "The Lady with the Dog," though I use the term imitation loosely. I wrote about that exercise here on my blog as well as for Ploughshares here. Anyway, here's how "The Samoyed" begins:
“Modern art is fine for decor,” he said, popping a vodka-soaked olive into his mouth. “But I don’t find it meaningful.” His lips were full, his eyes a gelid blue, his jaw-line well-defined with a stubble that seemed to Jane too calculated.
I'm delighted to have a new short story out today in Gordon Square Review, a journal based in Cleveland that spotlights writers from Northeast Ohio alongside those from around the world. Here's how "Hinges" begins:
"In fact in Vienna I starved a little."
If you'd like to hear me read a snippet of the story, and snippets from the stories, essays, and poems in Issue 7, register here for the virtual launch party happening tomorrow at 7:30 pm EST! (And, if you'd like to hear me read tonight, I'll be discussing the politics of then and now in historic fiction virtually at Greenlight Bookstore with Kris Waldherr, author of The Lost History of Dreams, and Tauno Biltsted, author of The Anatomist's Tale; register here for tonight's event.)
Many thanks to Prose Editor Nardine Taleb, Editor-in-Chief Laura Maylene Walter, Issue 7 Prose Readers Jackie Krogmeier, Alexandra Magearu, and Valli Jo Porter, everyone at Gordon Square Review and Literary Cleveland!
So, my first Chicago-based publication is about life here as an immunocompromised person during the COVID-19 pandemic...I wrote the piece a month ago, and it's a snapshot of my last day in the "normal" time of moving freely about the city, taking public transit, going to a medical appointment, going to a museum. A silver lining is I get to mention the work of Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón, which I encountered at the Chicago Cultural Center. You can explore more of Ayón's work here.
Here's how my piece in Another Chicago Magazine begins:
I was sitting inside an airtight booth with my nose clipped shut, inhaling and exhaling into a tube with all my might.
Here is a source of comfort in difficult times: all issues of Fairy Tale Review are free for the foreseeable future. Kate Berheimer wrote on Twitter:
This doesn't put a dent in the painful news today, but maybe it will help some people through the difficult hours. I've always found that being in the company of a good fairy tale helps me do a little bit better, be a little bit kinder. It's why I founded this journal in 2005. xo
I wrote "More Like Home Than Home," the title story of my story collection, as an antidote to the darkness of Daughters of the Air. It was meant to comfort me, and I hope you find comfort in it too. It appeared in the Wizard of Oz-themed Emerald Issue. Now free and online, thanks to Fairy Tale Review , JSTOR, and Wayne State University Press.
Last year around this time, Michael and I traipsed about Portland for AWP, skirting the conference itself, simply enjoying off-site readings and the book fair on Saturday. It was a lovely way to round out our time in the Pacific Northwest.
This year, because of our move, I never had any intentions of going to the conference in San Antonio, but because of the coronavirus, lots of folks, including my publisher Lanternfish Press have cancelled their trips. Because small presses depend on AWP each year for sales, a virtual book fair has been set up as a Google Doc by Trevor Ketner, publisher of Skull + Wind Press, inspired by poets G. Calvocoressi, Dana Levin, and Greg Pardlo. Now folks can browse from afar, and check out the many beautiful books and journals on sale here at #AWPVirtualBookfair. In random scrolling through the virtual book fair, I came across this intriguing book of poetry, Goodbye Wolf, by Nik De Dominic. Most discount codes are good through Sunday. Lanternfish Press is offering 30% off all of their books (including Daughters of the Air); use the code AWP2020.
Another press I love that has cancelled its trip to San Antonio is Fairy Tale Review. Their newest issue, back issues, subscriptions, and the complete set of issues are 20% off. Use code AWP20. The title story of my in-progress story collection, "More Like Home Than Home," is in their Wizard of Oz-themed Emerald Issue. It's set in Brooklyn in the 1980s and is a potpourri of the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Twelve Dancing Princesses.
But what is a book fair without getting to pick up a book and open it at random? Below is random page from Daughters of the Air (you can read the opening over at Tin House). Beneath that, a taste of what all is in FTR's Emerald Issue.
Stay healthy out there! Enjoy yer book browsing & book reading!