Dreams Under Glass

“Sensitive, unsettling…revelatory.” -Newcity

A novel for our modern times.” -Buzzfeed Books

A self-sabotaging diorama artist turned paralegal faces a shocking and surreal death at her law firm against a backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis in New York City.

Now out from Lanternfish Press!

As the economy collapses around her in 2008 New York City, recent art school graduate Binnie takes a job as a paralegal to pay the bills. As her art projects languish on the back burner, she begins to obsessively imagine her daily grind expressed in unsettling and sometimes violent dioramas. Somehow, someday, she’ll find the time to construct them. In the meantime, she’ll walk this unsatisfying tightrope between financial stability and the life of a working artist.

But after a shocking and surreal death occurs at the law firm, Binnie wonders if her frustration is pushing her darkest imaginings to life.

ORDER THE BOOK

Paperback: Exile in Bookville * Women & Children First* Elliott Bay Book Company* Bookshop * Three Avenues Bookshop * Roscoe Books * The Understudy * Lofty Pigeon Books

Digital: Kobo * Apple Books * Nook * Kindle

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Audiobook: coming Fall 2024!


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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DREAMS UNDER GLASS

A darkly delicious exploration of modern entrapment, Dreams Under Glass is both a coming-of-age novel and a horror story about gluttony, greed, and art. Szilagyi binds the spell with confectionary precision and a collector's sense of wonder and ceaseless want. This book rattles with its refraction of a world in which telling the truth might be the most difficult art.

—Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee

“First, you have to want,” believes Binnie Greenson, a young artist shuffling through her life as a paralegal in New York City on the eve of the Obama election. In Binnie, Szilagyi gives us a sardonic heroine who collects strange objects - a deceased aunt’s cut-glass perfume bottle, a shard of a co-worker’s glass eye, a plastic baby Jesus plucked from her boss’s bile – yet struggles to collect herself or “game the system,” as her mother suggests. As rich men begin to turn up dead in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and lawyers hold their secrets, Szilagyi’s story turns to the twentysomethings on the margins, whose friendships, heartaches, and love are threatened most by the self-indulgence of the times. Szilagyi’s sharp, wry prose captures millennial ennui and ambition alike in this sometimes-dark, sometimes electric, completely fascinating novel.

—Sonora Jha, author of Foreign and How to Raise a Feminist Son

Dreams Under Glass captures the disaster of being an aspiring artist trapped in a law firm-day-job at the moment of financial collapse. Szilagyi is very good at revealing the small daily horrors of longing for a creative life, of being a young woman with a giant imagination whose yearnings are invisible to everyone around her. This novel is a broken glass eye gazing up at you while you stand in cheap heels for too long around people who will never love you. Szilagyi puts the shard in your hand, it glimmers while it cuts.

—Corinne Manning, author of We Had No Rules

Dreams Under Glass is a waking dream of a book. Anca Szilágyi’s startlingly gorgeous novel interweaves the tale of a wistful young artist-turned-paralegal with the mysterious, nocturnal art of Joseph Cornell. It’s Szilágyi doing what she does best: sublime language laced with stunningly original imagery and mordant wit. This one is going to stay with me for a long time.

—Kris Waldherr, bestselling author of The Lost History of Dreams and Unnatural Creatures