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!
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’m grateful to Isla McKetta for her thoughtful review of Dreams Under Glass, which she calls engrossing, fascinating, and touching. Here’s a fun excerpt:
I won’t reveal the major shift that happens toward the end of this book, only that there is one and that I’ll never think of the color turquoise quite the same way again.
Read the full review (plus a review of Dorthe Nors’s essay collection A Line in the World!) here.
Five years ago today, my debut novel Daughter of the Air was born. It was 15 years in the making (yowza) and the launch party was that very night at the beautiful Hotel Sorrento. I was in conversation with my dear friend Corinne Manning. What a cherished memory!
It’s been such a joy to see my book make it’s way out in the world. I’m grateful for all the praise it’s received, including this generous response from acclaimed Pulitzer-finalist and MacArthur genius Karen Russell:
"What a strong song Daughters of the Air is, a chilling and beautiful novel that has left its indelible mark on me—I am simply in awe of Anca Szilágyi's prose, her Calvino-like gift for illuminating the darkest subjects, and her fearless, fever-bright imagination."
You can order copies from your favorite local bookstore or choose from one of my favorites like Elliott Bay Book Company, Powell’s, Exile in Bookville, and Madison Street Books (which still has a signed copy!). Here are a few photos from that night (full photo album on Facebook here).
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.
I can count on one hand how many publications I had this year, but it was a year full of tremendous personal highlights. Mainly: M. & I became parents in January! One day when I catch my breath I will write about that journey. There's a lot to say, and I need a lot of childcare to get it done. :)
In February, Capra Review published my short story "The Samoyed." Here's an excerpt I like:
In a large glass case beside a tapestry where the beast was hunted and speared, the horn of a narwhal gleamed. “To prove the existence of unicorns, men would drag back these tusks from poor old narwhals. The horn of a unicorn would have remarkable curative qualities, they claimed, for anything from rheumatism to insomnia to impotence.” Robert and Jane walked on into other rooms. The docent’s voice trailed behind them. “You could grind it up into a powder.” Jane imagined sprinkling narwhal horn powder atop her head, imagined coarse, white sand falling through a shaft of sunlight, an iridescent shower of skittering grains.
In June, Orion Magazine published my lyric essay "A Dill in Every Soup." Following the medieval theme of the prior excerpt, here's another excerpt I like:
“During the Middle Ages,” WebMD tells me, “people used dill to defend against witchcraft and enchantments.”
Finally, in November, Scablands Books, based in Spokane, put out their beautiful anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller. I have two short fairy tales in this volume. Why not pick up a copy from Spokane's Wishing Tree Books or Auntie's? Here's an excerpt from "Moss Child":
A lace of bright lichen crept up her arms, chin, cheeks. The green crept from her limbs up the sides of the thickened tree trunks, under so much soft moss that the echoes of footsteps and animal sounds grew muffled in the gulch.
Another very bright spot of the year was chatting with Karen Russell at Hugo House's Novel Nights. Here is Italo Calvino's essay "Lightness," which is a favorite of mine and which she brought up in conversation.
There's much to look forward to in 2022. Among other things, I am especially hoping there will be a COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5. In the meantime, I'm teaching a few virtual classes for Hugo House and Atlas Obscura, January-April, both over Zoom and in an asychronous format. Maybe I will make to AWP in Philadelphia in March? As that is Lanternfish Press's homebase, it would be sweet. Then in the fall Lanternfish Press will release my second novel. Huzzah! I also have a couple short publications in the pipeline, another lyric essay and a short story.
But before all that, I am turning back to revising my third novel and sinking deeper into Maggie O'Farrell's beautiful and absorbing novel Hamnet. Hope you have a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season!
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!
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!
This past weekend was my sixth time attending the AWP conference. My first was in New York in 2008, an overwhelming affair of 8,000 writers crammed into a couple Midtown hotels. That year, I sat on the floor beside a woman from Texas Tech who thought my plan to wait five years before getting an MFA was absurd. The next thing I knew, I was working as a paralegal to save money for graduate school, and by August 2009, I had a full ride to the University of Washington and Michael and I moved cross-country to Seattle. You could say that AWP changed our life pretty radically.
Over the years, we went to a smattering of conferences, but each year I went to fewer and fewer panels, as they tend to repeat and I learned you can only soak up so much information. In 2015 in Minneapolis, I mostly had lunch and dinner with friends, a most pleasant experience, but I'd realized the conference fee had been a waste. Next time, I resolved, I would go to AWP without going to AWP.
Last year in Tampa, with my novel just out, I didn't get to do that. But *this* year, in Portland, it finally happened, and I highly recommend it to folks who've been around the AWP block. I was more relaxed. More hydrated! I had time to stay on top of my online teaching, so less stressed.
Now for some highlights:
Wednesday night, we started at The Old Portland, a wine bar owned by Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. They only serve old French wine; I misheard the description of the Corsican rosé as "foggy" and enjoyed it very much; Michael enjoyed a ten-year-old red Bordeaux. Then, the very Portland-y (more stoner than twee Portlandia) bartender said, "Yeah, we don't like advertise or anything," and showed us the Odditorium, the band's 10,000-foot "clubhouse," where they rehearse, record, film music videos, and the like. It was cavernous and quiet. Michael, a big Dandy Warhols fan, was in heaven.
Thursday afternoon, we went to the Vermont Studio Center alumni happy hour. I'd finished a first draft of Daughters of the Air there back in 2007. Three former literary staff read poetry from their recent releases. A line from Nandi Comer's American Family: A Syndrome: "If there is blood, the artist has chosen to omit it." Ryan Walsh spoke of the connection between visual art and writing at VSC (I still cherish learning how to make a mono-print there) and vegetable poems. Zayne Turner read from "Her Radioactive Materials."
Most of the other readings I attended featured numerous readers, so, forthwith, more of a collage:
At Strange Theater: A Fabulist Reading, there were spiders and trousseaus and swans roasted in revenge and Japanese monsters and red rooms and porcine men and tyrants and cauliflower-fueled murder. A doll's head was raffled off, among other trinkets; I offered a rare talisman of Cyndi Lauper's trip to Yemen.
Friday, we went to the PageBoy Magazine Happy Hour, featuring 17-word poems and prose. It was a fun afternoon of zingy one-liners and dreamy experimental works and Gertrude Stein jokes. Then we were off to Literary Bingo with Lilla Lit, a new Portland-based reading series; it was fast and furious with four-minute readings (a loud buzzer ushered off writers going over). Chocolate was pelted at every shout of "bingo!"; I caught a peanut-butter ball overhead with my left hand and won a copy of Jennifer Perrine's In the Human Zoo. I also read a poem and someone won a copy of Daughters of the Air. All readings should have strict word and time limits and buzzers and prizes!
Saturday, we paid $5 to get into the convention center book fair. I had a lovely time chatting with Chicago-based folks in advance of our move (yes! big news tucked away over here; more on that in a future post), signing books at the Lanternfish Press table, and seeing fellow LFP authors Charles J. Eskew (Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark) and Andrew Katz (The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls). It was also super cool meeting Carmen Maria Machado, who signed Her Body and Other Parties and Carmilla, an LFP reprint of a lesbian vampire romance that predates Dracula, with a Borgesian introduction and footnotes by Machado.
We also picked up a whole slew of poetry in translation (from Romanian and Hebrew), essays on art, novels, short story collections. I can't wait to read it all! Our last stop was the Northwest Micropress Fair at the Ace Hotel, where I signed copies of Sugar, my chapbook from Chin Music Press, and hung out with regional small presses, which felt like a special little send off before we leave the Pacific Northwest.
I heard that the conference had ballooned to 12,000 (15,000?) attendees. Amazing! Perhaps, perhaps, we'll be in San Antonio next year, and if not San Antonio, Kansas City, and if not Kansas City, Philadelphia...?
The Friday of AWP is always the best day. The nervous energy of Thursday has dissipated, and the inevitable Saturday flu epidemic has not yet emerged. I woke early to respond to student stories and breakfasted on a leftover Cuban sandwich, wondering if it would make me barf later. Reader, it did not! A fortifying start.Alan Sincic, the fantastic Orlando-based writer who was The Furnace's Writer-in-Residence, was on a 9 am panel on the lyric sentence. I'm a fan of Sincic's prose *and* mad presentation skills, so the early start was well worth it. The moderator, Pearl Abraham, kicked off the discussion with this advice: "If the voice doesn't work, write better sentences." Then Sincic woke up the crowd with a call-and-response activity, that gradually built up to us chanting together: "I am an individual and will not surrender my voice to the crowd." He said, "A sentence is less like the beam of a house and more like the branch of a tree," that a sentence has ghost limbs lost in the editing process. He proceeded to take apart this Mark Twain sentence, examining each word choice and its placement as a way of generating suspense and delight: "Is a tail absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog?"Baylea Jones analyzed a sentence from Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, graphing sounds and letters, including patterns of consonant use, and internal rhymes: "Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Wow! I had fun retyping that.
I ducked out early to get to my book signing at the Lanternfish Press table, where I got to hang out with my editor Christine Neulieb and publisher Amanda Thomas, and connect with new readers and old friends, including Julia Mascoli, who was in my Tin House workshop in 2013 and who is Deputy Director of Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop doing great work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in Washington, D.C. (Seattle-area folks, you can donate books to prisons and other under-served communities via Seattle7Writers Pocket Libraries program.)Later, I chilled at the Cambridge Writer's Workshop table, celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, which includes my "Summer-Inspired Writing Prompts." Co-editor Rita Banerjee was there with her mythic poetry collection Echo in Four Beats, as was Maya Sonenberg, whose new chapbook After the Death of Shostakovich Père is out from PANK Books.That night, the celebration continued at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, a beautiful old mansion a mile away from the convention center. There were many, many readings. One was from Women in the Literary Landscape; crowds whooped in appreciation for Anne Bradstreet, Virginia Kirkus, and the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. (I am a rube for not remember which biographer was mentioned, so here are five of them!) Nell Painter, author of A History of White People, read from her forthcoming memoir Old in Art School, Diana Norma Szokolayi read her poem "Sarajevo," Sonenberg read an anti-plot manifesto, and I read an excerpt from Daughters of the Air in which Pluta has committed arson in Brooklyn and found refuge in an abandoned Times Square theater. Fun! There is so much more to write...! I'll wrap things up in one more post. Sneak preview: there will be blood.
![Wassily Kandinski [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/6261bf01e839c9307c8f2c88/626c4f2442eae95feb5e83d0/626c4f3842eae95feb5e8b6b/1651265336792/1024px-kandinsky_-_improvisation_klamm_pa291186.jpg?format=original)
I am pleased with how fitting it is to have an essay called "How to Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years" in The Nervous Breakdown today. Here's how it begins:
1. Choose a horrific moment in history you know little about, in a country, Argentina, you know little about, but which seems to have troubling similarities to the here and now. Research for years. Images from the Dirty War sear into your mind.continue reading
In other news, I made a handy-dandy card with all of my upcoming out-of-Seattle readings (as always everything is on my appearances page).
Huzzah!
Today is the big day! Daughters of the Air is out in the world. I'm excited that after so many years this is really, really real. Really. It is out of my hands and readers are reading. Whoa. I am especially excited to share that Tin House has published an excerpt on their blog today, which you can read right here.If you'd like to help me get the word out, there are a few things you can do:Join me at the launch party tonight at 7:30 pm at the Hotel Sorrento. Elliott Bay Book Company will be selling books there. Or join me at one of my upcoming events around the country. Bring friends! Buying the book at bookstores show booksellers there's enthusiasm for it. And it supports all the good work booksellers do. And, um, in general buying the book helps me pay the bills and write my next book.Review the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, Powell's, your personal blog...Let people know your thoughts.Let your friends know if you think they might like a novel that is dark, fabulist, lyrical, political. Or if they're into cities like New York, Buenos Aires, Manaus, or Rome. Or if they're into myth and fairy tale. Or if you really like my sentences and think they'd really like my sentences too!Request your local library carry it. Have I told you lately how much I love libraries? Here is a very old blog post about one of my favorite toys.If you're part of a book club, suggest it to the group. I'm happy to meet with groups in person in the Seattle area, or while on book tour, or by Skype.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. I love to give readings and talks. Daughters of the Air will be taught in a human rights class in the fall and would be a great fit with other classes too, such as contemporary fairy tales, Jewish studies, Latin American studies, and small press publishing.Send me photos of you with the book and I will post it on Instagram! Or tag me, and I will happily repost.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!
Fun news: Lanternfish Press is running a giveaway for Daughters of the Air on Goodreads. You can enter here. If you've already pre-ordered the book, perhaps you might add it to your to-read list and recommend the giveaway to a friend or two?
Oh boy, oh boy! Things are getting real. My debut novel, Daughters of the Air (formerly known as Dirty), will be released on December 5, 2017. You can pre-order it starting today: from your local independent bookstore (like Elliott Bay Book Company) via IndieBound, directly from Lanternfish Press, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.Why are pre-orders important? Well, they show booksellers there's enthusiasm for the book, which means they order more books, and they all count towards the first week of sales--so the accumulation of pre-orders gives books a shot at the bestseller list in the first week it's out.This has been such a long time in the making; the seedlings were planted as far back as 2001, when I spent a month at the National Institutes of Health, recovering from surgery. In fact, I have a very personal essay about that time, and how I decided to seriously pursue writing, in Catapult today. You can read "Art Therapy Before Surgery" here. Then, come see all the incredibly kind things people are saying about the book here.I love the cover art by Nichole DeMent, a piece called "Bird Moon" that was originally mixed media encaustic. I can't stop staring at it. Nichole's work is super dreamy, and I've coveted it for my novel since coming across it in 2013. Over on Lanternfish Press's blog, I shared more thoughts on Nichole's work and how my writing process draws from visual art. I've been hugging my advanced review copy since it arrived in August and have been so grateful for editorial director Christine Neulieb's championing of the book as well as all the good, hard work going on at Lanternfish Press.If you're in Seattle, please come to the launch party at the Hotel Sorrento, hosted by Hugo House, on the night of the release, December 5, at 7:30 pm!Want to stay in the loop about other events and related hooplah? Subscribe to my short & sweet monthly newsletter here. Thank you for your support!
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Last week I went home for the Brooklyn Book Festival and it was so lovely! Tuesday night, my parents took Michael and me to Malachy McCourt's event at Greenwood Cemetery for his new humorous book
Death Need Not Be Fatal.
I love that the cemetery is also a literary venue with a club called the
; the coordinator promises "the history of cremation has a few laughs." Perhaps my favorite (non-funny) thing McCourt said is this, regarding his atheism: the conception of hell is "ecclesiastical terror. I don't want to hang out with the people who invented that."We also went to the Whitney Museum to see
's refurbished, motor-driven mobiles and "
An Incomplete History of Protest,
" an inspiring exhibit tackling art as protest from the 1940s to the present. The views from the Whitney are fantastic. It's hard not to fall in love with New York over and over again.
Stay tuned for more book news next week! And if you'd like to get that news right in your in-box, I've got a short and sweet monthly newsletter you can sign up for here.
[gallery ids="3481,3482,3483,3484" type="square" orderby="rand"]I am beyond thrilled to announce that Lanternfish Press is publishing my debut novel, Dirty, in late 2017 or early 2018. Dirty is a magical realist work about a teenage runaway whose father is disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War.The seedlings of this book emerged long, long ago, in 2001. And I worked on the first draft in fits and starts for years until I decided an MFA at the University of Washington would help me get it done. Then, mid-way through the program in 2010, Michael and I managed to travel to Argentina. (There was a pitfall to super cheap plane tickets; I wrote about it for Airplane Reading.) At graduation, my thesis advisor David Bosworth compared the process of finishing a novel to the gestation of a whale. Fast forward to 2017. Not sure which beasts gestate for 15 years. But this labor of love will see the light of day!Lanternfish is based in Philadelphia and makes gorgeous, genre-blurring books like Vikram Paralkar's The Afflictions and Christopher Smith's Salamanders of The Silk Road. The moment I read Lanternfish's cred0, I knew it would be a good fit:
READ. READ VORACIOUSLY. READ WRITERS WHO DON’T LOOK LIKE YOU. READ FOREIGN WRITERS. READ DEAD WRITERS!Writing is a conversation. It can offer people who lead wildly different lives a window on each other’s worlds. It can bridge gaps between cultures and gulfs in time, overcoming unbearable solitudes. We tend to click with writers who’ve grappled with many stories and whose work is informed by that broader perspective.
I am so delighted they agreed.
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