BooksFURTHER ADVENTURES IN THE RESTLESS UNIVERSE
A story collection CARRYING THE BODY
A novel Blurbs for "Carrying the Body"
@ "Carrying the Body" draws you in and keeps you spellbound by the mesmerizing power of Raffel's prose."--Esmeralda Santiago @ Dawn Raffel is one of America's freshest voices since Faulkner. "Carrying the Body" isn't read. it's absorbed through the pores."--Patricia Volk @ "Carrying the Body has a poetic grace that smuggles its emotional power into your head. Long after you have finished the novel, the exquisite imagery and language linger and echo. Surely Raffel doesn't write with ordinary tools--she must engrave her words onto fine stones with a tiny, diamond-tipped chisel."--Katharine Weber "This taut, evocative tale of two sisters, a child, an insensate father and a dead mother, is a kind of family horror story in the manner of the grim tale of the Three Little Pigs, told and retold here. Dawn Raffel is a writer of genuine orginality and integrity."--Robert Coover Reviews
"Raffel's writing snatches the breath out of your body and engages you in untangling the mystery of this family." --USA TODAY "Exquisite prose and a keen unflinching eye for the subtleties of familial disintegration" --THE REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION "As compressed and urgent as a telegram, this book evokes furtive passions and dreams that push relentlessly toward the light. --O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE "Extreme literature." --PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY "Cryptic but oddly compelling...there is no denying the power of the language." --BOOKLIST "Raffel's use of language is potent...certainly worth the disquietude it creates." --LIBRARY JOURNAL Excerpt
SWEET She was born in December in Baraboo or thereabouts--small, still, blue, a girl, and, by some trick of oxygen, alive. She lived to marry late. She bore descendants--visions, of sorts-- herself transformed, and she herself, by way of them, in view of them, transported irretrievably. Girls, of course. Elise, yes, and yes, of course, the older, the sister--dress and brush and kiss and tell. This is the story: Night at last. The tucking in. "Once upon a time...." and was it pigs or was it bears or something altogether else? It was all of it, always, it seemed, about shelter. Listen up. Look at her: at work in the pantry, impeccably laced--robe, hair, rib--a baster of meat, of scrap. "Mother," they call. These are items she loves: a ring, the linens, curtains at a window, lilac or some such flower as that. There is a light she despises. They want her to look. "Mother," they call her. "Sweet. Come here." And here she is, as if sniffing the gauze, as if under the glass. Someone is snuffling, always, it seems. "Like so," she says, adjusting a finger, a thumb, one hand, two hands: Here is the church and here is the steeple, open the doors--" and what? Keep what? There’s a whistle in the not-too-distant distance, a chill in the room. "What is it?" she says. And where have they got to--one, two, three of them, husband and offspring? "Tell me," she says. Who is sleeping in the chair? Who is breathing on the pillow? What in the world has been spilling in the kitchen? "Tell me," she says. And hasn’t she said this more than once, twice, in some untidiable past? Roving again, she holds herself, arms full of bedding and other violently laundered belongings, stanching the flow, mopping a floor, a brow, a whetted body. "Girls!" she calls. "Girls?" The voice is what fails her, and also the riotous pulse at the wrist, and also, of course, the present moment. "Sweet," she said, sweetly. Open the hand, and here were the people. Here was the cake, the knife, the bride. Here was the coldest sheet. In the Year of Long Division
A critically acclaimed collection of short stories Blurb for "In the Year of Long Division"
As it has been with every new writer of intricate beauty and substance, so it must be with Dawn Raffel, a writer who is, in Gerard Manley Hopkins's words, "spare, original, strange." Here again is the joy of wonderment, of first discovery--a book to ponder, to read and reread, to share with other lovers of literature, to give as a gift--which is what "In the Year of Long Division" was to me. --Tillie Olsen |
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