By skin of my teeth I am getting this Women in Translation Month blog post out into the ether. I thought it would be cute to read Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season after reading Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over. Colwin’s essay collection Home Cooking was a great comfort to me and, not surprisingly, there was so much to love about her last novel, which is the first novel of hers that I read. At the same time, I can see issues of race in this 1992 novel that feel a bit out-dated, but I can relate to the protagonist’s anxiety as a Jew and her desire to belong.

The transition to Melchor’s 2016 novel Hurricane Season (translated in 2021 by Sophie Hughes) was not at all cute. That novel is as intense as its title suggests and then some. The chapters are long and devoid of paragraph breaks, creating textual claustrophobia as the cherry on top of the unrelenting anger, violence, misogyny, lust, and homophobia that wreaks havoc on a poor Mexican village where, at the opening of the novel, a witch has been murdered. The lack of paragraphs reminds me of László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango (trans. George Szirtes), another novel of unrelenting darkness, but that one moved like suffocating sludge, whereas Melchor’s novel is more propulsive (if also increasingly horrific in its violence). I would not recommend Hurricane Season to the faint of heart, but if you can handle a dark story that will get you outside of your comfort zone and show you a desperate corner of the world, and if you’d like to see how the author manages a different point of view in each chapter (with something of a dusky reprieve by the end), definitely check it out.

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!

January is almost over. Is it too late for a blog post on setting intentions? I would venture not! The pandemic and being a new parent (do I still get to say "new" now that my child is one?) is a constant reminder to be gentle with myself and find the right level of ambitious that I find fulfilling without giving myself a migraine.

What soldiering through a migraine feels like?

So what are my writing and publishing goals for this year? With my second novel releasing from Lanternfish Press in late September, I have to be mindful of the marketing and publicity work just around the corner. I learned with my first novel, Daughters of the Air, that marketing and publicity can be ::e n d l e s s:: I do like it! But I also need to keep space for work-work, creative writing, and life.

I started writing my second novel two days after I began submitting my first novel—with a haiku workshop as a palate cleanser in between. I started writing my third novel, my current work-in-progress, just a year after starting my second novel. It's a long story as to why that I won't get into here, but I was heartened to learn that Jess Walter juggles multiple book projects simultaneously, and I'm sure many other writers do as well. Welp! The big hope for this year is I "finish" that third novel. (NB: Here's my silly essay "How to Finish a Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years"; I love that this essay landed in The Nervous Breakdown.)

My other writing goal is write two more essays for the collection that I began the same year as Novel #3. I'm taking an essay writing class through Atlas Obscura, where I've been having a great time teaching fairy tale writing. It'll be my first time as a student since taking a wonderful Hugo House class in 2016 with Alexander Chee on making fictional characters of historic figures, and I'm really looking forward to it. My plan is to write one piece arising from the class and one essay after finishing reading A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, which I have ordered from one of my favorite Chicago bookstores, Exile in Bookville, which is located in one of my favorite buildings in the city.

That's it for my writing. I think those are plenty of goals for the year, given what I've got on my plate. I stopped aiming for 100 rejections per year a few years ago, though I do think it's a good goal to have if you're starting the submissions process and need to develop a callous against rejection. By my calculations, I had a 17% acceptance rate in 2021 so I do need to aim a little higher as my general goal, per advice from Creative Capital, is 10%. But I'm not going to tear my hair out over this one. As I say to my son, "Gentle! Gentle!"

My last goal is to continue to help emerging writers stretch their craft and hone their approach to getting their work out in the world. If you have short stories or a novel you're working on and if you'd like to work one-on-one with me, you can check out my coaching and consulting page at Hugo House here.

What are your goals for 2022? Any special plans for writing, reading, publishing? Or maybe you want to learn to cook something special this year? My cooking is toddler-centric now, but I've been dipping in and out of Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I love her opinions: "Powdered rosemary must be shunned." Onward & upward & twirling, twirling, twirling!

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Celestial Fantasy with Tamara Toumanova), ca. 1940, collage and tempera on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 2002.58.36

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!

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

Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear, translated by Susan Bernofsky, is a delightful triptych of a novel, exploring the lives and perspectives of three polar bears in captivity: a Soviet circus performer, her daughter Tosca in an East German circus, and Tosca's son Knut in the Berlin Zoo.

A desire for connection—with humans, other animals, and ancestors—weaves in and out of the story. Of course, food always captures my attention, so here is the matriarch connecting with her soup:

In the mirror I saw my red-smeared lips, a masterpiece of the beets. I'd never eaten root vegetables voluntarily, but when a beet came swimming in my bowl of borscht, I immediately wanted to kiss it. Bobbing amid the lovely dots of fat floating on top—which at once awoke my appetite for meat--the beet was irresistible.

The unnamed matriarch pens her memoirs, struggles with an unscrupulous publisher, travels to East Germany and then Canada, where she gives birth to Tosca. The second section of the novel, which appeared at first to be from the perspective of a human performer in an East German circus, seemed a bit slow to me, and I wasn't sure if it was because the stress of the pandemic had shortened my attention span or because Tawada's fun imagining of a polar bear's mind was so refreshing that I was eager to return to it. But her use of perspective is slippery; it's thrilling to learn the human was trying to write Tosca's story, but, as befits a human, was making the story about herself. For this problem, Tosca offers writing advice that is at once practical and surreal:

"First you should translate your own story into written characters. Then your soul will be tidy enough to make room for a bear."

"Are you planning to come inside me?"

"Yes."

"I'm scared."

We laughed with one voice.

Tosca's son Knut rounds out the story. We meet him as an adorable tiny cub nurtured by the zookeeper Mattias:

Knut would feel the trembling of these delicate human fingers, hear the oceanic sounds emanating from Mattias's entrails--and Knut's abdomen would take up the tune, trembling in harmony.

The zoo, the media, and politicians hold up Knut as earth's savior from climate catastrophe. That is, until he is no longer cute. While Knut's section feels a bit didactic at times, hammering in the point that society doesn't care about things that aren't cute, it is unfortunately warranted given how much work there is left to do to prevent catastrophe.

In any case, there is much more to Knut's story than the issue of cuteness, which I won't spoil. The novel's gorgeous ending brings together Tawada's playfulness with perspective throughout the book in a manner both uplifting and astounding. Read this book, and do something for our planet, please. Compost, start your own vegetable garden, green your roof, plant a tree or five million.

Occasionally I fantasize about opening bookshop. It would be on a corner, with big windows, and the curated tables and shelves would feature literature from as many corners of the world as I could muster, and there would be lots of calming blue colors and it would be real cute. Who knows if I'll ever dive into such an endeavor? In the meantime, it was remarkably easy and fun to curate a Bookshop.org affiliate page. If you've not heard about Bookshop, it's a new way of buying books online while supporting local, independent bookstores. Most profits are split among the 400 or so participating brick-and-mortar stores. I expect my curated lists will grow and change over time. (And, why, yes, Daughters of the Air is on there too.) Take a look! Hope you find something good to read.

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.

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.

Continue reading

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!

I had a lovely time discussing the craft of writing with Thea Prieto of Propeller Magazine last week! We touched on research, breaking workshop "rules," and a handful of the books that enriched the "broth" that was the manuscript of Daughters of the Air.  You can read the interview right here.

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!

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?

Well, gosh, November snuck up on me! I try not to let a whole month go by without popping in over here, so here's what's been cooking.  Daughters of the Air will be out in 18 days (you might add it to your Goodreads list to be notified of giveaways); the last several weeks featured early mornings hunched over my laptop pitching book critics and events to bookstores and a handful of book clubs. Anxiety-fueled self-googling is at peak levels, which, yes, I know I should not be doing. But every now and again someone says something lovely about the book, which, as I've said on Instagram, has me rolling around like a happy puppy. (Also: I am increasingly on Instagram, where I overuse creepy filters, such in the photo above.)I just finished teaching for the first time a fiction thesis writing class in the online MA program I work for. It's an interesting class that coaches students through the first 30-50 pages of a novel or story collection, and I am embarking upon it once again very soon, just as my own novel will be hitting shelves. Our final week's discussion on paths to publication (traditional vs. hybrid vs. self-publishing) will be rather timely.  In related news, as I head out on book tour next year, I'll be teaching online for Hugo House as well: an eight-week intermediate fiction class touching on point of view, dialogue, and scene construction. Watch for one-day classes at Chicago's StoryStudio and Port Townsend's Writers' Workshoppe! Amidst all this activity, I'm looking forward to some holiday downtime, if that is even possible. Lately I've been starting my day with Anne Carson's Plainwater and ending it with Mavis Gallant's A Fairly Good Time: a superb literary sandwich. Before the year is over, I hope to get to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gothic novel The House of the Seven Gables. I picked it up from a used bookstore in Montreal, The Word, just before graduating from college...in 2004. Yes, I guess it's about time I get to that one.Stay tuned for stories forthcoming from Lilith Magazine, the New Zealand-based Geometry, and the new Pacific Northwest-based Cascadia Magazine. If you'd like monthly news in your in-box, which will include information for upcoming events across the country, you can sign up here. Until launch day!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of chatting with Steve Barker for the 76th edition of Ordinary Madness, his Arts & Entertainment podcast. We talked about novel writing, rejection, The Furnace, the effects of winning awards, and a bit about my time at McGill University in Montreal. I also read two short-short stories, one of which is quite new. Fun!

On December 3 at 7 pm, I'm reading from my novel PARALEGAL at the Jewelbox Theater in Belltown. This performance culminates a year+ of work on a project whirred forward by support from 4Culture and Jack Straw Cultural Center, for which I am very grateful. I'll be joined by four fantastic Jack Straw Fellows whose work intersects with mine, on the topics of art, money, and desire: Bernard Grant, Emily Bedard, Matthew Schnirman, and Martha Kreiner.  Please come!

I'm retraining myself to write novels. My first novel is floating in the ether, I wrote a quick, rough draft of my second novel some time ago, I focused on finishing my short story collection, and now, with the leaves falling off the trees outside, I'm in my dark office x-raying that second novel to get at an outline.  I already had a couple outlines in hesitant pencil, one very bare bones, one a bit more detailed. But I'm hesitant to launch into a rewrite yet as I seem to still be in a fallow period. I'd have loved to take a suitcase full of books into the woods and just read for 10 days. Alas.  A decent second option was to bolt to Vancouver with M. for the weekend, where two writer friends were visiting from New York. We gorged ourselves on dim sum, wandered around Coal Harbor and the West End, had cocktails at Cloud 9, a bar that rotates on top of the Empire Landmark hotel and that has some very 1995 cocktails (we stuck to a gin martini and an old-fashioned), and went on a short, mild hike where we spotted purple and orange mushrooms and black slugs and a seal. We waved at the seal, and the seal seemed to give us a little nod before disappearing in the water, probably grumbling that we took his lunch spot, Cod Rock. All this to say, there are different ways to refill the well. Reading and travel (and with travel, eating) are some of my favorite ways. So is looking at art.I feel a little out of shape, novel-writing-wise, because I'm at the difficult step where I've decided to rewrite entirely. The first draft was quick fun, throwing details on the page and seeing what sticks.  I want to be a lot more strategic about the second draft.  I decided to try using novel writing software, to help me feel less scattered, and a few friends recommended Scrivener. This morning I finally started to get the hang of it, and now I have a more detailed outline with fancy arrows and nesting files and everything. Soon (hopefully!) I can go deeper into the writing cave to write those scenes.Outlining at this point feels helpful, but sometimes I outline when I'm stuck in writing because I don't know what else to do. I might already have the outline in my head. I might have gone over that outline obsessively already. But I still write it down, maybe more than once, as if I'm in a holding pattern, and then it just feels like treading water.  In a way, it is like a writing exercise I used to do, coming up with arbitrary lists of specific things. But it is also very different from those lists. Rather than racing from plot point to plot point., those lists try to get me to think about very specific details or to think about words I don't often use. Red things; things that start with the letter V. More particularly (while still being quite broad), Ray Bradbury recommended making lists of nouns as a way to jog creativity. He wrote, "Make  a list of 10 things you hate and tear them down in a short story. Make a list of 10 things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are." Such sound advice, for not only finding ways into writing, but writing with passion.Back in September, as Rosh Hoshanah approached and I thought about all the oncoming holidays (hello, Thanksgiving-Hanukkah merger), I thought it would be fun to just write a list of all the dishes my grandparents, great aunts, etc. were known for. I invited M. to add to that list.  This got me thinking about how many stories might be in each these specific dishes as well, and how revisiting memories is another way to refill the well.Here's that dish list:Bubby's mandelbrotGrandma's chopped liverAunt Shirley's jello moldsAunt Ellen's meatballs in a sweet tomato sauceAunt Myra's chicken schnitzelGrandpa's sarmale (large and loose and juicy)Eva's matzo balls (dense as bricks)Aunt Shirley's brisketMom's meatloafGrandpa's meat piesBubby's Swedish meatballsGrandpa's cheese piesBubby's matzo balls (large and fluffy)Aunt Myra's walnut cakeMami's salade de boefGrandma's apples and riceGrandma's salade de boefEva's fish soupEva's salade de boefAunt Myra's trifleEva's sarmale (small and tight and smoky)Grandpa's fried kippers and onionsGrandma's upside down cakes  (fruity and light)Eva's plum dumplingsGrandma's plum dumplingsMr. C's plum dumplingsEverybody's plum dumplingsWhat do you do in your fallow periods? How do you get yourself ready for big creative projects?Related posts:1. Background Reading for a Novel-in-Progress2. Parking Signs to Power Lines3. Writing from Art