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.

I had a delightful time chatting with Joy Lanzendorfer yesterday on her radio show “What’s the Story?” which airs on The Krush 95.9 in Sonoma County. You can listen to the podcast here:

Be sure to check out Joy’s novel Right Back Where We Started From, which shares American Dream themes with Dreams Under Glass.

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!

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!

I've written an If My Book column for Monkeybicycle, wherein I compare Daughters of the Air to weird things. Here's how it begins:

If Daughters of the Air were fruit it would be blood orange and pupunha.If Daughters of the Air were cheese it would be Roquefort. Also: Kraft saved from a dumpster.

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The podcast from my 2015 Jack Straw fellowship is now up on their blog. Curator Kevin Craft spoke with me about my novel-in-progress PARALEGAL and the creative process. Then I read an excerpt, featuring, among other things, cabbage and spite. (Per Levi Fuller's recommendation, I might retitle it CABBAGE AND SPITE.)Here's how the podcast begins:

Sometimes she wondered if part of her motivation to pursue art was simply spite.

ListenYou can pick up an anthology with this excerpt and those of all the 2015 fellows here. Many thanks to Kevin Craft, Levi Fuller, Joan Rabinowitz, and everyone at Jack Straw Cultural Center!

Thanks to the tremendous generosity of the Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, I spent the earlier part of this month in the Netherlands, researching my third novel. M came as my trusty research assistant, furnishing highlighters, snacks, and sweaters with alacrity. There's a lot of information crammed in my skull right now, which I am organizing as best I can, hoping it seeps into the crevices of my subconscious fruitfully.What struck me on our trip: the birds! (I know, I know, put a bird on it.) Egrets, loons, swans, geese, ducks, grouse, crows; white-breasted, brilliant blue, long-tailed, plump and shimmery; raucous, trilling, warbling, chortling. Fact: the first painting acquired by the Rijksmuseum features a bold, angry swan.In the moat by the citadel in 'S-Hertogenbosch, an egret bullied ducks until a trio of geese chased the egret to the boardwalk where it loomed. This continued on a loop for a while. A seagull swooped down to chase the egret further and when the egret returned, the geese trailed it, sinister and slow. Sinister, at least, until we realized there were goslings near.In a canal in Rotterdam, three loons had a lovers' spat. Slapped wings, held heads beneath the water--murderous! Not far from there, we strolled past the "swan bridge," soaring and modern.On our last night in Amsterdam, we stayed at a fanciful b&b on the Western Canal Belt. Our hostess could not greet us when we arrived. She hid our keys in a flowerpot. Up two steep, narrow flights of stairs, we flung open the door. The lights were on, the doors and windows open, a gust of wind coming from the terrace, which led to another room with another open door, and the flutter and chirp of green and yellow parakeets, in a big cage looking down upon the Keizersgracht canal. Old books stacked everywhere, art on the walls and leaning upon the books, a laptop left on a long wooden table, half open, as if our hostess had left in a hurry. It had the feel of that computer game Myst, where mysterious rooms, empty of people, always suggest a presence, a place quickly abandoned. We did meet her late that night and in the morning at breakfast the birds flew freely about the room and she would call to them and air kiss them and talked to us about Argentina and Barcelona and photography and her love of Amy (Winehouse).Apropos of birds, on the flight back, I finished Noy Holland's debut novel Bird, a raw gorgeous thing. Here, I leave you with an excerpt:

She was hungry again and gorged herself on chicken fried steak and skittles, on vermilion faces of canyons, cliffs you could dig with a spoon.

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

10:30 on a Summer Night operates at a slow boil. The noir-ish 80-page novella follows a French couple, Pierre and Maria, on vacation in Spain with their four-year-old daughter Judith and their friend Claire.  The story opens with talk of a murder in the small town where they've landed, their plans to get to Madrid thwarted by a storm. Rodrigo Paestra, having killed his wife and her lover, is on the run. With that crime of passion in the background, tension between Pierre, Maria, and Claire builds, complemented by the landscape's moody weather:

"The afternoon's dark blue, oceanlike mass moved slowly over the town. It was coming from the east [....] The water that ran between their feet was filled with clay. The water was dark red, like stones of the town and the earth around it."

Maria drinks manzanilla after manzanilla. Customers in a local cafe talk about the horror of Paestra's crime while "eating, more or less heartily." Like many tourists stuck in the town for the night, the family and Claire must sleep in a hotel hallway.  In Maria's wooziness, her thoughts drift between Paestra's whereabouts (they say he's on the rooftops), and the possible budding infidelity between Pierre and Claire. Her restlessness tears her from the claustrophobic hotel hallway, out into the wet night, looking for Paestra:

"He had gone around the chimney. Maria kept singing. Her voice clutched her throat. You can always sing. She couldn't stop singing once she had started. He was there."

The novella twists and turns into scarier and scarier landscapes.The extreme weather of the lightening storm is followed by extreme mid-day heat of the open country. Maria wonders, "What would you save, if you took Rodrigo Paestra to France?" The double love triangle leads to a bizarre chain of events I have no intention of spoiling. But the last image of the three adult travelers at a night club, finally in Madrid, watching a man with a "chalky laugh" singing with "loving, languorous, nauseous drunkenness," evokes the complexity, the utter tangled thorniness, of this story.

You can get a copy here.

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Erin Malone and I were on King 5's New Day Northwest yesterday morning talking about the Jack Straw Writing Program. I'm still all happy-flustered from having been on TV for the first time! You can watch the segment right over here.

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For Women in Translation Month, I'm reviewing three novellas right here on this blog, as well as tweeting poetry in translation daily. The first of the three novellas is "Love in a Fallen City" by Eileen Chang. Stay tuned for a selection from Alexandra Kollontai's Love of Worker Bees and Marguerite Duras' "10:30 on a Summer Evening."

Eileen Chang has long been on my to-read list. So when I learned about Women in Translation Month I put her at the top of my agenda. You may know her through Ang Lee's adaptation of her 1979 novella Lust, Caution. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she straddled two radically different worlds. Translator Karen S. Kingbury writes in her introduction to Love in a Fallen City that "Chang's worldly form of the sublime was achieved [...] by viewing her father's [aristocratic, traditional] Qing world from her mother's [modern, Edwardian] perspective, but with an artist's compassionate detachment." This straddling of eras is apparent from the start of "Love in a Fallen City." Liusu, a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee, struggles to live with her stifling family in Shanghai. Their clocks are literally one hour behind the rest of the city to "save daylight," and, "The Bai household was a fairyland where a single day, creeping slowly by, was  a thousand years in the outside world."

When news of her ex-husband's death arrives, her family tries to convince her to return to his family as his widow--thus relieving themselves of her burdensome presence.  Rather bleakly, her elderly mother says, "Staying with me is not a feasible long-term plan. Going back is the decent thing to do. Take a child to live with you, get through the next fifteen years or so, and you'll prevail in the end." A matchmaker suggests Liusu find a new husband or become a nun and eventually convinces the Bai family to allow Liusu to travel with her to Hong Kong. There, the major conflict unfolds, when it becomes clear that Fan Liuyuan, "an overseas Chinese" had contrived to have Liusu come to Hong Kong. He wants "a real Chinese girl," "never out of fashion," and when she calls him a modern man he replies, "You say 'modern,' but what you probably mean is Western." Their uncertain budding relationship takes Liusu into territory as ambiguous and unsettling as being a widow in her mother's home, but with the frightening freedom of being more or less alone in a huge, unknown city.

Chang's writing is intensely visual, influenced by modernism while maintaining sparkling clarity. On Hong Kong's waterfront:

"it was a fiery afternoon, and the most striking part of the view was the parade of giant billboards along the dock, their reds, oranges, and pinks mirrored in the lush green water. Below the surface of the water, bars and blots of clashing color plunged in murderous confusion. Liusu found herself thinking that in a city of such hyperboles, even a sprained ankle would hurt more than it did in other places."

Her binocular vision (to borrow the the title of Edith Pearlman's collection, another straddler of worlds) is the kind of perspective I find endlessly fascinating. The invasion of Hong Kong has serious repercussions for Liusu and Liuyuan's future together. It's the sort of widening out, from the deeply intimate to the global, that I love to encounter in fiction and strive to achieve in my own work. I'm so glad I finally got to this novella and look forward to reading the rest of the collection. "The Golden Cangue," another novella in the volume, is translated by Chang herself--it'll be a real treat to get a sense of how she viewed her own work and how it should feel in English.

For more Women in Translation Month goodness, check out Meytal Radziniski's wonderful blog Biblibio.

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For The Los Angeles Review, I wrote about the debut fabulist novel Minnow, winner of the 2014 South Carolina First Novel Prize and published by Hub City Press. Here's how the review begins:

Landscape reigns in Minnow, the fabulist debut novel by James McTeer II. Set in South Carolina Lowcountry, the story follows a small boy, Minnow, on his quest to find medicine for his dying father. A pharmacist sends him to a witch doctor who in turn sends the boy off on an impossible journey. In exchange for Dr. Crow’s medicine, he must penetrate wild marshlands, swamps, and pine jungles in search of the grave of Sorry George—a witch doctor who once cursed fifty-two men with a fatal, grisly fever, and “[e]ach one of them coughed up some bloody thing, like a little thing that might have been alive once.”continue reading

I haven't posted story snippets to this blog in a long time, but I had such a wonderful time this morning at a generative workshop for the Jack Straw fellows, I wanted to share one here. We discussed our writing concerns and what we're dwelling on now, and the general theme among us all had to do with connecting dots and making leaps. Kevin Craft, our curator, then offered this concept he learned from Heather McHugh about hypotaxis and parataxis--the causal-oriented and the free associating, waking logic and dream logic.Then he pitched the Story Spine exercise, which originates from improv. It's a basic exercise offering a rigid structure for a story that is then written quickly, using free association. The stakes are low. I used the basic plot of the novel I'm working on now, which made the exercise feel somewhat mechanical, though the final step seemed to open up for me a more expansive way of seeing the ending--something I will continue to ruminate.Then Kevin asked us to do the exercise in reverse. I decided not to write from my novel and just let myself go. This version of the exercise was very fun. And I can see why you need to go forward first, to feel the mechanics of an unfolding story, and why thinking backwards can allow the writing to get wilder. Here's that backward story I wrote:

And ever since that day, she held that stone in her mouth before bed, as a reminder. Finally, she chose a slick green stone on a rocky beach strewn with sea vegetables. And because of that, she went to the coast, to look at something wild and open and to fill her lungs with salt. Because of that, she felt all tied up in a box, a sensory deprivation tank. Until one day she crouched in on herself into the tightest ball. And every day she tried to be smaller and smaller. Once upon a time, she didn't want to be seen.

One month into this program, and it is already so helpful and generative and amazing.

My sixteenth set of writing prompts for Ploughshares, and the last post in this series, compiles 29 all-time favorite prompts from writers and writing teachers across the internet. Here's how it begins:

To round out this year of blogging about writing prompts, I polled writers and writing teachers for their favorite writing prompts–generally, simple prompts that have been useful to them as writers, students, and teachers. One such prompt that I found extremely useful in my early days of writing was, “Write about an obsession.” From this straightforward suggestion, I learned a lot about what can drive a compelling story.Some of these prompts are accessible and instructive; others offer wonderfully evocative images and ideas. For ease of reference, I’ve grouped the prompts into several categories, but certainly some would fit into multiple boxes. It is my hope that these twenty-nine prompts–some specific, some quite open-ended–will help you jump-start any stalled works-in-progress and generate lots and lots of new material.continue reading

The prompt I mentioned as one of my favorites encountered as a writing student, "write about an obsession," resulted in my story "Go East," published in Pindeldyboz back in 2006. It's about one of the most addictive computer games ever. Guess which one!

I did a little interview on the Hugo House blog about my upcoming class co-presented with the Henry Art Gallery and about what I've been reading and writing lately. You can register for the class here and see previous students' work from the class here and here. Join me Thursday nights 6-8 pm starting January 30. Happy new year!

[gallery columns="4" type="circle" ids="1449,1446,1442,1450"]Yesterday and all of last night and into 9 am this morning, the Center on Contemporary Art hosted a 24-hour art-making marathon at their Ballard location, the Shilshole Bay Beach Club. One of the 21 artists participating, John Osgood, wanted to collaborate with other artists during this frenzied event, and last month, I was invited to submit some of my writing. I sent John a couple short stories, and didn't know what would happen until I arrived at the marathon yesterday (of course, pretty much simultaneously with his other collaborators Amir Farhad, Robert Hardgrave, Stephen Rock, and a last minute fifth collaborator which added to the frenzy). John told me he'd chosen to work with my story "Skitter" and would paint a parade scene from it. He proposed that I paint text on the canvas and he would layer colors on top of that. I loved the idea, though I was nervous about painting, even if it was in my realm of text. After I decided what text should go on the canvas, he showed me how to use a paint pen, and I practiced as much as I could so that it didn't look like a 3 year old or drunk person had written it, though I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing. John spray painted over my first layer of text, then wrote over the same excerpt with a red paint pen, using his infinitely cooler handwriting. Then he spray painted it again and handed me a calligraphy brush and more liquid black paint and asked me to write the text again in smaller letters, trying not to cover over the other two layers but getting between them. John is probably taking a well-deserved nap right now, seeing as he painted 5 new pieces, collaborating with 5 different people, all between 9 am yesterday and 9 am today. The works (and there was a ton of other fantastic stuff being made by 20 other artists) will be auctioned off tonight during CoCA's fun-n-fancy gala dinner, which is, I understand sold out. Of course I am eagerly awaiting the final product from John's take on "Skitter" -- above are a few photos from documenting the process. Special thanks to John Osgood and to Nichole DeMent. It was a fantastic night!***Update:Here it is, the final product, "Harush," by John Osgood & Anca Szilagyi:

Kathlene Postma's reading is next week, and I'm so looking forward to it. An excerpt from her story "Fetch" is up on The Furnace blog to give you a taste.