I’m grateful to Alex Carrigan for this kind review of Dreams Under Glass in Necessary Fiction. I so appreciate how different reviewers have highlighted different aspects of the novel, whether the creative process, Jewish identity, the romance, or here, the power dynamic of work:

One of the novel’s central themes is how forces beyond an artist’s control can stymie both art and artist. Binnie works in the Lipstick Building, which housed Bernie Madoff’s organization and was at the center of the housing market collapse. Her firm is run by three people who are set in their ways and comfortable throwing their wealth and power around. Binnie may enjoy the fruits of their occasional generosity—chocolates in the break room, free opera tickets—but her bosses demand ever more in return for these perks, which they use to wield power over Binnie.

Read the full review here.

There’s a great review Dreams Under Glass in Windy City Reviews this morning. Florence Osmund writes:

The Dreams Under Glass main storyline is interesting, engaging, and one to which many people will relate. Three story elements—Binnie’s passion for art, her relationship with her boyfriend, and the untimely, suspicious death of one of her co-workers—are woven together into a cohesive and impressive tale.

Read the full review here.

I’m grateful for this great review of Dreams Under Glass in Newcity. Mara Sandroff calls the novel “a sensitive, unsettling look at young adulthood and the contrasts between art, money and greed.” She writes :

Szilágyi is a confident writer with a crisp, clean voice and deep empathy for her characters. ’Dreams Under Glass’ may deal with familiar themes, but Szilágyi treats them with authenticity and grace. In a genre that can err toward cynicism, this comes across as revelatory.

You can read the full review here. Signed copies are available for sale from Exile in Bookville and Women & Children First. Be sure to leave a note in the comments if you’d like a signed copy. Thank you for your support!

I reviewed Julian K. Jarboe's debut story collection Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel for The Seattle Review of Books (Lethe Press, March 2020). Here's how the review begins:

Scissors dropping out of a uterus, a head attached to its neck with just a green ribbon, cement poured down throats to keep the soul from escaping — these are but a few examples of what I think about when I think about body-horror, a genre in which the graphic metamorphosis or destruction of a body creates a viscerally disturbing experience for the reader. Myth and fairy tale, in their rawest iterations, are natural precedents for body-horror. And isn’t the body itself, so much a source for horror? On its own the body can mutate; or outside forces, like, oh, say, a deadly pandemic exacerbated by capitalism and climate change, can impose new, terrifying ways of trying to stay alive.

continue reading in The Seattle Review of Books

The sixth Women in Translation Month is coming to an end soon. It was an atypical WITMonth for me, with the cross-country move and so many of my to-read books still in storage. Still, I'm excited to read Heike Geissler's Seasonal Associate (trans. Katy Darbyshire), which Michael reviewed for The Seattle Review of Books. And, for the same publication, I interviewed Meytal Radzinski, the founder of WITMonth, about her project to crowd-source a new canon, 100 Best Books by Women in Translation.

I was excited to see some of my nominations on the final list, such as Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring (trans. Martha Tennent) and Mireille Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (trans. Ros Schwartz). And a good number of books in my to-read pile are there too, if I can just get them out of their boxes! I hope to start with Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (trans. Susan Bernofsky). Did any of your favorites make it to the list or pique your interest?

 The Seattle Review of Books invited me to participate in their fun & breezy column, "Whatcha Reading?" I touched on dark psychological fiction, heartbreaking poetry, an essay on the cleverness of crows, and more. Something for everyone! Plus: a preview of some Women in Translation Month picks.Over on the Magic Realism blog, Zoe Brooks had this to say about Daughters of the Air: "In every way this is a mature intelligent book which may not suit all readers, but it is an example of how magic realism is so suited to ambiguity and  to difficult subjects." You can read the whole review here. Also, I wrote a very personal essay about life choices here on Healthline.Finally, this Monday at 6:30 pm at the Phinney Neighborhood Association, I will be participating in a panel discussion on the author-editor relationship at the Northwest Independent Editors' Guild. The panel will include Dave Boling, author of The Lost History of Stars and Jamie Swenson of the University of Washington marketing and communications department. Matthew Bennett of the guild will moderate. Not in town but curious about the topic? You can tune in live on YouTube.

The January issue of Locus Magazine includes a lovely review of Daughters of the Air.  Here is an excerpt:

Only Le Guin bothers to write coming-of-age stories with such attention to each word… Daughters of the Air is well worth reading. Beyond its singular blend of myth and magic, its potent and poetic language announces a worthy new voice in, if I can call it this, the literature of the melting pot. Szilágyi is writing from the center of multiple cultural Venn diagrams, about historical and emotional topics more readers need to explore.-Katherine Coldiron

You can buy the issue here.

The term "dumpster fire" has been used in reference to 2017 at least several million times. At one point in October, I considered taking some classes on how to cope with anxiety and insomnia that were organized specifically in response to our collective ongoing sense of doom. I didn't though—because I was overwhelmed! Ha.Despite everything, I need to celebrate 2017 on a personal level. Daughters of the Air, which I'd toiled over for years, finally came out, and people are reading it and telling me they are enjoying it! Michael and I celebrated the holiday season with candles and latkes and lights and dim sum and snow (!) and The Shape of Water (a beautiful love story!) and chocolate peanut butter pie and New Year's Eve back at the Hotel Sorrento's Fireside Lounge for reading (me, Teffi's Subtly Worded, him Hanna Krall's Chasing the King of Hearts, which I'm happily adding to my Women in Translation Month queue), writing, live jazz, people watching, and bubbles. What more could I ask for?The day after Shelf Awareness called Daughters "a striking debut from a writer to watch," The Seattle Review of Books included it among five Seattle novels that made Paul Constant's year:

Anca Szilágyi’s Daughters of the Air is a fantastic debut — a magical realist fairy tale set in gritty New York City. It’s the kind of book that leaves you utterly confounded at the end, as you try to remember all the twists and turns that you took along the way. It feels like an impossible book, somehow — a product of alchemy, a creation of unearthly talents.

Wow! The book hasn't been panned yet, but when it does, I'll hang on to these two reviews for dear life. I was also super happy to see Tara Atkinson's novella Boyfriends included in the end-of-year list; I gobbled it one sitting and highly recommend it.Yesterday afternoon, I was thrilled to see The Seattle Times reviewed Daughters too—my first review in a major American newspaper!

Anca L. Szilágyi’s intense debut novel, "Daughters of the Air," locates a deeply personal story against the surreal backdrop of [Argentina's Dirty War].

  [gallery ids="4953,4952" type="rectangular"]I'll be moseying up to a newsstand later today so I can rustle up the paper and feel the newsprint on my fingers.In other news...

• Every year, I strive to collect 100 rejections. (Why? See this wonderful Lit Hub article by Kim Liao.) In 2016, I made it to 106, plus eight acceptances. In 2017, I garnered 93 rejections and 16 acceptances. This is actually bad in terms of my other annual goal, which is to be rejected 90% of the time. I need to aim higher.
• There are just four spots left in my online Fiction II class at Hugo House, which begins on January 14. You can sign up here.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this longer-than-usual blog post! As a gift, here is a Goodreads giveaway for you. Already read Daughters? Leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Powell's would help spread the word! You can do this regardless of how you obtained the book (other bookstores, my publisher, the library, and all that fun stuff).Onward!

I had a glorious long weekend with Michael: actual snow in Seattle, dim sum, The Shape of Water (a beautiful love story!), chocolate peanut butter pie...and it's been a happy Tuesday morning too, with this glowing review of Daughters of the Air by Dave Wheeler in Shelf Awareness:"A striking debut from a writer to watch, Daughters of the Air is gritty yet gorgeous, severe yet convivial, as it navigates uncertain times in a treacherous world."You can read the whole review here.

I was utterly verklempt reading Paul Constant's beautiful review of Daughters of the Air in The Seattle Review of Books earlier today. Here's a taste:

Daughters is a confident and finely wrought novel. Szilágyi is at equally at home writing about Argentina’s complex historical conflict and the glittering garbage heaps of Brooklyn. She focuses unflinchingly on the violence we deliver on each other, and the mental scars that violence leaves behind.

You can read the whole piece here.

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!

This morning, I was super excited to see Daughters of the Air included in Bustle's round up of best new fiction releasing in December. Huzzah!Reviews are coming in as well. Leena Soman of Cleaver Magazine calls Daughters of the Air "a clear-eyed meditation on the experience of being haunted by the unknown and what we are perhaps too scared to imagine.” In A Geography of Reading, Isla McKetta writes:

"...I want to read a book that pushes me so far beyond my own experience as a human and a writer that I’m already off the cliff and halfway to a crushing death before I realize what’s happening. Daughters of the Air took me there."

And, Elizabeth's Editions says “[Szilágyi] is a smart writer, dropping you straight into the white hot truth of life.” Yow!The novel releases in just four days. I hope to see you at the launch party this Tuesday at 7:30 at the Hotel Sorrento, or at one my events around the country in 2018!

After I read The Land of Green Plums a few years ago, Herta Müller joined a short list of authors whose work I want to read all of.  I am not the sort of reader who methodically works through an oeuvre; I crave different voices. But this list includes Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Mavis Gallant. (It used to include Angela Carter; I adore her short fiction, but actually found trying to read her novels like trying to eat an entire chocolate mousse cake.) Müller's fiction is poetic and harrowing and sheds light on the country my family comes from.  For me, she is a must.For my third installment of  Women In Translation Month, I tackled The Hunger Angel. This novel tells the story of Leo Auberg, a young German man in Romania deported to a labor camp in Russia in January 1945. I was surprised to learn that this happened: all Germans living in Romania and from the ages of 17-45 were forced to "rebuild" the Soviet Union. Indeed, as Müller explains in her Afterword, this was something shameful that Germans in Romania only discussed among themselves, if they discussed it at all. (Müller emigrated to West Germany after being persecuted by Ceausescu's secret police.)The Hunger Angel meditates on objects. Life in a gulag is tedious, so in lieu of a tight narrative arc, the first two-thirds of the book move laterally from things like cement and coal to yellow sand and firs. There's a weirdly loving chapter about a kind of shovel known as "the heart-shovel," which, by virtue of its design, allows Leo to forget himself as he works in ways that other tools or tasks don't.And, of course, as the title implies, there's a food problem. With just one piece of bread a day and two bowls of cabbage soup, and no mid-day meal, the hunger angel emerges an antagonist who skews how prisoners perceive their world and how they behave. But memories of food from childhood buoy Leo and his prison-mates. One day, every summer, his mother would take him to the Café Martini where he could gorge himself on sweets:

We could choose among marizpan truffles, chocolate cake, savarins, cream cake, nutcake roll, Ischler tartlet, cream puffs, hazelnut crisps, rum cake, napoleons, nougat, and doboschtorte. And ice cream--strawberry ice cream in a silver dish or vanilla ice cream in a glass dish or chocolate ice cream in a porcelain bowl, always with whipped cream. And finally, if we were still able, sour-cherry cake with jelly.

As if being in a gulag is not challenging enough, Leo is in the closet. When men and women dance on Saturday nights (who knew they had dances, albeit sad dances, in gulags?), he remains off to the side. Men and women couple in the barracks; he does not. Though he observes: "Half-starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects." Over the course of the novel, this meditation on objects also becomes a larger meditation on loneliness and longing and trying to stay alive.Leo has a poet's eye, and it is that vision, that attention to language, which makes reading this essential book bearable.

August is Women in Translation Month. This is the fourth year of the campaign, which was founded by literary blogger and biophysicist Meytal Radzinksi. I'm a big fan of this effort to raise awareness about women writers in translation and read more of them. And, I'm super excited to have my piece "Translation is not kale" in The Seattle Review of Books today, which discusses WITMonth in a wider context and revels in some of my favorite-favorite books. You can read "Translation is not kale" here. I've also got three reviews scheduled right here on my blog, starting today and continuing the next two Thursdays. More soon! 

I'm happy to have a piece in the July/August issue of Women's Review of Books, discussing Jade Sharma's Problems (Coffee House Press), Julia Franks' Over the Plain Houses (Hub City Press), and Angela Woodward's Natural Wonders (FC2). You can purchase a digital copy here.In other news, last week I had a lovely time chatting with fellow LaSalle Storyteller Award winner Peter Mountford and Scott James of Solipsis Publishing about the writing life and the impact the award has had on our work. You can watch the video here. The deadline for the 2017 award is August 28. If you're a Washington State fiction writer, you should apply! 

Women in Translation Month is around the corner! Last year, I compiled a list of translated books by women that I enjoyed and created a Women in Translation Bingo game. I also wrote about novellas by Marguerite Duras and Eileen Chang and poetry collections from Rocío Cerón and Angélica Freitas.This summer has been a bit more hectic as I've been teaching more, taking my second novel through an eighth draft, and researching my third novel. However! I'm excited for Women In Translation Month and wanted to share with you four books on my to-read pile.What have you been reading?

Thanks to Women in Translation Month, I recently learned about two fantastic contemporary poets published by Phoneme Media, which, I must say, designs some gorgeous bilingual books.Diorama, by Rocío Cerón, is super rich and multilayered. Her long poem "13 Ways To Inhabit a Corner," under the subtitle "Pinhole" speaks particularly to peering into something very closely. The looking is so careful, the sensual details so packed in, the poem demands and rewards multiple rereadings. Each of the 13 sections builds a particular atmosphere. In section I: "In the midst of a stampede, a hand rests on the arc of a kneecap. Cigar and smoke. Rosy cypress sleep." And, in section VII: "Hills, clouds, boreal forest. Woman undressing on a frozen bed. Beneath the folds of her clothing a constellation of sleet." As her translator Anna Rosenwong points out, the work is associative and hallucinatory. Other poems are more political. "DIY Instructions or the National Telluric" includes the line "civil disobedience breaks out but still the dead pile up" -- a line that made me sit up out of the intense dream state of "13 Ways to Inhabit a Corner." Diorama won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, and it's no wonder. It's the sort of beautiful, meaty book you need to settle into, chew on, and revisit.Whereas Diorama is experimental and gorgeous and challenging, Rilke Shake,by Angélica Freitas is more fun for everyone. Playful, energetic, and irreverent, Freitas takes references to poetry greats (Rilke, Keats, Gertrude Stein, etc.) and popular culture, and simply shakes. The work is sonically chewy: "I think about stravinski / and the beard of klaus kinski / and the nose of karabtchevsky / and a poem by joseph brodsky" she writes in the poem titled "what passed through the head of the violinist as he hurled toward his death against his black hair clutching his stradivarius in yesterday's great air disaster". She imagines bathing with Gertrude Stein, who "lets one loose under the water" and asks in "i can't read the cantos": "shall we free ourselves from ezra pound?" The poems do have poignant moments, such as in "sioban 4" where the speaker wonders: "does she think of me / does she also ask what happened // to the good girls of sodom, the ones who / always // kissed on the stairs / vanished in libraries / preferred to turn to salt?" I will be pushing Rilke Shake on many people. It's too good to be missed.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

I picked up Alexandra Kollontai's Love of Worker Bees at Boneshaker Books during the AWP conference in Minneapolis. Usually, I skip a book's introduction, dive right into the fiction, and read the introduction afterwards. Kollontai's work is a rare look at the Russian Revolution, and since I'm also reading Dr. Zhivago, I wanted to get some background on her. This may have marred my reading experience.

The introduction made me crave reading more history, and perhaps Kollontai's nonfiction. Her fiction served to illustrate the feminist causes she fought for, and so in reading the short story "Sisters" I felt biased against the artistry of the story, about "a deserted wife and a prostitute who find a common bond." (Let me back up and say I think if the explicit aim of the writer is to illustrate a political cause, it would be more effective to write nonfiction. That isn't to say fiction must be apolitical. Pretty much all art is political. I believe a fiction writer should make story primary. The politics arising out of the story tend to emerge in a more complex, satisfying way when you don't set out to illustrate a specific agenda. Let the story drive.)

Set in the 1920s, "Sisters" is a frame story in which someone at a "delegates conference" is being confided in. The storyteller has left her husband, has nowhere to go, and fears she may have to resort to prostitution. After her daughter's illness, she was laid off from her job. Her husband, an executive in a government trust company, has taken to coming home drunk. She would like to work and he would like her to stay home. Things get worse when their daughter dies; he brings prostitutes home. The woman is horrified, humiliated, ready to run the second prostitute out of their house--but she sees a desperation in this sad young woman's eyes, and as they talk, realizes she is an educated young woman without money or shelter, starving, anguished. The storyteller realizes that if she hadn't been married, she'd be in a similar situation. She leaves her husband and...is at risk at being in the same situation. The story illustrates a pressing issue that Kollontai had to fight for relentlessly, that women's rights are an essential part of the revolution. She ended up in diplomatic exile for much of her adult life.

The story is affecting, in the way that if someone you met told you that story you would care and be concerned, and want to do something. So in this way, the story achieves a goal. However, the story is mostly told in summary, in the way that someone might relate their tale in real life, not told in scene, with the kind of sensory detail that draws you closer to the humanity of the characters. It feels one step removed. And so I didn't love the story, and I wouldn't press it upon anyone unless they were digging into the subject matter--the issues of feminism and Communism, the struggles of people living in Russia after the Revolution. I'll add as another caveat that is the third piece in the book. I did not read the first two and do wonder if the book is "front loaded" with stronger stories. So take my lack of enthusiasm with a grain of salt, check it out if it intrigues you, and let me know what you think.

This series on Women in Translation continues next week with a Duras novella and will finish at the end of August with a couple surprise books of contemporary poetry, review copies I was delighted to receive in the mail.

The Seattle Public Library and Seattle Arts & Lectures launched Summer Book Bingo in Seattle this month. I got all excited, printing out my card and jotting a book in each category I want to read, for example:Checked out from the library: The Woman Upstairs by Claire MessudCollection of short stories: The UnAmericans by Molly AntopolBanned: Fun Home by Alison BechdelThere are 24 categories in all. Librarians are on hand to make recommendations. Thanks to them, I've added V is for Vendetta and Eleanor and Park to my reading list!Because of my already ambitious reading plans for the summer, including Women in Translation Month, I'm not aiming for a blackout, just BINGO. But it occurred to me. Book Bingo is endlessly adaptable. What about Women in Translation Bingo? Each category satisfied by a book in translation, by a woman.I made my own card, based on SPL & SAL's card, simply swapping out Set in the NW, Translated from another language, and local author for Author 10+ years older than you, From a culture you want to know more about, and International bestseller. Then I really nerded out, thinking about Linguistic Diversity Bingo, based on language families. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. One Book Bingo at a time.If you're planning to participate in Women in Translation Month (I hope you are!) this would be a fun way to do it.What books are you reading this summer?

August is Women in Translation Month (WITMonth), designed to encourage readers, reviewers, publishers, and translators to explore more books in translation by women. If you've been following the VIDA count, then the grim statistics around women in translation (gathered diligently by Meytal Radzinski) is, unfortunately, not a surprise: women writers comprise only about 30% of books translated into English. As I'm passionate about cultivating a diverse literary ecosystem, this is a project near and dear to my heart. And though I'm happy WITMonth is an annual event, I'm getting started right now. Because there are SO MANY good books and I'm sure there are SO MANY MORE out there waiting to be picked up by a publisher and gobbled by readers.I immediately pulled all the books from my shelves that fit the bill. I made a read pile and a to-be-read pile. Of the read pile, I'd like to make some recommendations, for those of you who'd like to join me in WITMonth. Read these books! And I'll be diving into the to-be-read pile and writing about the gems in that pile in August. Read those books too! Let's talk about 'em!Recommended BooksDeath in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from Catalan by Martha Tennent (Open Letter, 2009). A gorgeously written and harrowing novel about cruelty among humans and violence in nature.Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2005). A dark, slender novel about a woman abandoned by her husband spiraling into terrifying psychological territory, with a helpful dash of absurd humor and redemption. After devouring this book, anything else was VERY difficult to get into. So good. This brief review in The New Yorker is spot on. I have not cracked open her more recent Neapolitan series, but it is definitely on the docket.The End of the Story by Liliana Heker, translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger (Biblioasis, 2012). Another dark novel. I'm sensing a trend? This metafictional work explores Argentina's Dirty War. I reviewed it for Ploughshares.Death as a Side Effect by Ana Maria Shua, translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger (University of Nebraska Press, 2010). As I note briefly in my review of Heker's novel, Shua's is "dark and wry and screwed up in the best possible dystopian way." Is it weird to quote myself? Oh well.Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2004). I adore Archipelago for focusing on translation and producing truly beautiful books. Dreams and Stones is probably the least dark book on my list, a kind of treatise on cities and imagination.Mile End by Lise Tremblay, translated from French by Gail Scott (Talon Books, 2002). I read this novel a few times, starting in a class in college on literary Montreal. It's set in the neighborhood I lived in while at McGill, which may be part of my attachment to it. And, yes, yes, this is another dark story, about an obese pianist at a ballet school teetering toward psychosis.The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller, translated from German by Michael Hoffman (Metropolitan Books, 1996). Muller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature, paints a grim picture of life in Romania under Ceausescu. The language is highly poetic, and I've been working on an essay about it (among other things) for quite some time. In fact, the assignment I've given myself for the next few weeks is to cut that essay up paragraph by paragraph to figure out how to keep going with it.Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi, translated from German by Vincent Kling (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012). Told from the point of view of an unnamed young woman, this is the story of Romanian refugees who travel through Europe as circus performers. Yes, yes, dark. But also with absurd humor. (Some criticize Muller for being humorless. I say, bah. Read her still. Not everything is funny ha ha.)Phew. That's a lot of recommendations. There are more in my pile. I may write more about them. More likely I will tweet my favorite bits from them in August. But not just August. Probably all year. WITForever!My To-Be-Read Pile. Stay tuned for reviews & more !