I am delighted to have a pair of short fairy tales in Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, out now from Scablands Books! This beautiful foil-stamped anthology, edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller, features an incredible roster of Pacific Northwest authors, such as Gary Copeland Lilley, Rick Barot, Shawn Vestal, Tess Gallagher, Ruth Joffre, Nicola Griffith, Kate Lebo, Elissa Washuta, and Lucia Perillo, to name just a handful, and has some wonderful illustrations as well—you can preview a couple of them, including one from my story “Moss Child,” here. You can pick up a copy directly from Scablands Books, or at Atticus, Auntie’s, From Here, and Wishing Tree Books in Spokane. If you’re based in the Pacific Northwest, your local library might like to know about it! Here is the “Suggest a Title” form for Seattle Public Library; many library systems have similar forms.
Happy Summer! I am once again contemplating how to merge Summer Book Bingo with Women in Translation Month. This year, I’m a new parent (have I said anything about that on this blog???), so my reading time is quite constrained. I have given up on trying for a blackout and am just focused on reading five adult books by September 7 (I will have read Goodnight Moon 50,000 times by then. Luckily it’s a brilliant book! I love Kate Bernheimer’s essay on it in Lit Hub.)
I am two books into my goal. I very much enjoyed Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum, which I put on the “Made You Laugh” square. It is a dark book about depression with a sharp sense of humor, narrated in a voice I need to return to (I also enjoyed the voice of Kirshenbaum’s An Almost Perfect Moment). The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim, which I put on the “Asian American or Pacific Islander” square is a beautiful novel which has one of those surprising-yet-inevitable telescoping endings that you just want to keep mulling over. The next square is “On Your Shelf,” and I’m reading R.L. Maizes’s story collection We Love Anderson Cooper. I am loving it. So this is a very fruitful book bingo thus far!
“Set in an Olympic Host City” is the square I am going to merge with Women In Translation Month. The Seattle Public Library has a list of recommendations on their blog here. I’m thinking I’ll opt for Valeria Luiselli’s Mexico City-based The Story of My Teeth (trans. by Christina Macsweeney). Then I also need a book for the “QTBIPOC” square; SPL once again has suggestions on their blog. Maybe I’ll re-read Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Roomas I so rarely make the time to re-read, but then again, branching out would be good too. Hmm…
I’m excited to have two fairy tales in Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, a Scablands Books anthology edited by Spokane-based superheroes Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller. The (foil-stamped!) book releases November 2 (perfect season to cozy up with a book while it’s drippy outside!), but discounted pre-orders are now available. Sharma shared a snippet of one of my tales on Twitter here. It’s an honor to be in the same book with Elissa Washuta, Ruth Joffre, and so many other talented writers.
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 curatedlistswillgrow and change over time. (And, why, yes, Daughters of the Airis on there too.) Take a look! Hope you find something good to read.
I reviewed Julian K. Jarboe’s debut story collection Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel forThe 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.
Neither of these are the physical book fair, but they are *both* at the #AWPVirtualbookfair!
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!
Paul Constant of The Seattle Review of Bookshad some lovely things to say about my new chapbook Sugar: “It’s a delightful little amuse-bouche of a book, with an ending that will charm Seattleites and tourists alike.” You can read more here.
This Saturday at 3 pm at the Chin Music Press shop in Pike Place Market, I will be reading from Sugar, as well as some foodie excerpts from Daughters of the Air. The fabulous poets Montreux Rotholz and Alex Gallo-Brown will join me, and there will be treats. Constant says it’s the literary event of the week! Here is the event on Facebook. Hope to see you there.
Daughters of the Air is a year old today! I’m celebrating with something bubbly tonight (cider? champagne? seltzer with a spritz of lime?) and feeling grateful for all the love my strange novel has received, from the crowd of smiling faces at my launch party at the Sorrento, to hitting the bestsellers shelf at Elliott Bay Book Company, to seeing my name on the Powell’s marquee, to eating my own face in cake form.
After entertaining a debut author’s wildest nightmares of being universally panned, or being skewered on Twitter, or just dissipating into the void unnoticed, discerning reviewers gave me such joy with their kind praise. I got a thrill learning that a library all the way in Australia owns a copy of my book. I got to travel to Portland, Spokane, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Tampa, Walla Walla, and San Francisco in support of the novel. I shared meals with book clubs and video chatted with human rights students at Pace University. Readers have told me, among other things, that the book gutted them, or made them feel seen. Hearing from readers has been the best, the best, the best. What a dream of a year.
The day I first held my book, in Seattle, memorialized in cake, eaten in Chicago.
Powell’s City of Books.
On the Eilliot Bay Book Company bestsellers shelf.
Did you read Daughters of the Air? Let others know what you think on Goodreads or Amazon or on Twitter or Instagram or…or…you know, word of mouth is a wonderful thing. Thank you so much!
In my last post I promised blood. Well, I’ll just say I slid my boot off Friday night and it was like I was one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. I’m still limping. On to day 3!
What is a better breakfast than a leftover Cuban sandwich? Leftover fried oysters. Just kidding! The Cuban sandwich was much better. Day 3 was the best because Michael got a one-day pass and we got to roam the book fair together.
“The Worst Writing Advice I Ever Got” is an irresistible title, so of course we wrenched ourselves away from the book fair for it. Here, without narrative, a fun grab-bag of quotes:
“Creative writing aphorisms are as useful as Dr. Phil.” –Chris Abani
“Your book won’t save you. It’s just something you’re going to do because you’re nuts.” –Min Jin Lee
“How do I handle writer’s block? I don’t write.” –Ada Limón
I appreciated Limón’s story of navigating two groups of people: those who roll their eyes at “abuelita poems” and those who say, “where’s your abuelita poem?” And Melissa Stein‘s remark that dread may be a sign that advice you’ve been given may not be for you, anxiety might mean it’s worth exploring the challenge, and excitement is obviously a good sign. Abani noted that “Craft advice is only important if you’re asking questions. What are you trying to do?”
We stuck around for a reading and conversation between Min Jin Lee and Sigrid Nunez. Nunez on writing about sex: “The vocabulary is not there. It’s either coy, clinical, or filthy, none of which do justice to human sexuality.” At the book signing, Lee called Michael and me adorable. So that happened.
My attention span went out the door by mid-afternoon, so it was off to the hotel bar for wine and fried calamari! Naturally, someone in panda suit wandered in.
Next year in Portland! Maybe Seattleites can get some party buses organized…
Eric Carle’s illustration of “Big Klaus, Little Klaus” in Seven Stories by Hans Christian Andersen has haunted me since childhood. When I imagined the bandits in “Scrolling Through the Feed” doing something nefarious in Interlaken Park, I pictured them in smudgy colors like this.
Over the summer, while immersing myself in Jess Walter’s fiction in preparation for interviewing him in December (you can now watch his Word Works talk on time, and the Q & A, here on YouTube), I reread his story “Don’t Eat Cat” and felt compelled to write my own zombie story. And, because it’s me, it’s a bit a fairy tale-ish. “Scrolling Through the Feed” went online this morning in Cascadia Magazine, a new publication focusing on the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia to Oregon. I’m happy there’s a new venue gathering long-form journalism, fiction, and poetry from the region, and one that that thinks beyond our borders.
It feels somehow appropriate for the story to go up on the same day of the State of the Union, which I will not watch. Thankfully, I’m reading tonight at the Literary Happy Hour at Capitol Cider, alongside Bill Carty, Jarret Middleton, and Jekeva Philips, hosted by Josh Potter. It runs from 5-7 pm. In line with their “drafts and drafts” theme, I’ll give a micro-craft talk on one of the earliest inspirations for Daughters of the Air. Speaking of which, this is your last chance (ever?) to enter to win a free copy of the novel on Goodreads. Go get it!
Anca L. Szilágyi is a Brooklynite living in Chicago. Her fiction appears in Lilith Magazine, Confrontation, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion Magazine, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Made at Hugo House, Jack Straw Cultural Center, 4Culture, and Artist Trust. The Stranger hailed Anca as “a fantastic magical realist.” She is the author of Daughters of the Air, which Shelf Awareness called “a striking debut from a writer to watch” and The Seattle Review of Books called “a creation of unearthly talents.” Her second novel is forthcoming in 2022.
Tomorrow at 8 pm PST, over Zoom, I will be reading at the UW MFA program's series Castalia, alongside Richard Kenne… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…2 days ago
In my last post I promised blood. Well, I’ll just say I slid my boot off Friday night and it was like I was one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. I’m still limping. On to day 3!
Anca L. Szilágyi 