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The fiction of Thaisa Frank, according
to the New York Times, works "by a tantalizing sense of indirection." The
critic Don Skiles has described her stories as being "in the
grand tradition of the fairy tale, the legend, the spell," and
the reviewer Rob Hurwitt has called her work "domestic magical
realism."
Thaisa Frank’s short stories have received two PEN awards, and
her two most recent collections SLEEPING IN VELVET, 1998, and A
BRIEF HISTORY OF CAMOUFLAGE, 1992) have been on the Bestseller
List of the San Francisco Chronicle. A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAMOUFLAGE
was included in Dalton’s New Voices. Both have been nominated for
the Bay Area Book Reviewer’s Association Award.
In addition to collections of short fiction Thaisa Frank’s work
has appeared in numerous anthologies, among the most recent of
which is the Polish anthology ROZNE KSZTALTY MILOSCI and Harper/Collins
READER’S CHOICE.
She has also written FINDING YOUR WRITER'S VOICE, co-authored with
Dorothy Wall, published in l994 with St. Martin’s Press. It has
been compared to Brenda Uleland's book IF YOU WANT TO WRITE and
has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish.
Thaisa Frank has taught writing in the graduate department of San
Francisco State, is on the part-time faculty at the University
of San Francisco and has been Visiting Associate Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition
to Polish, her fiction has been translated into Finnish.
Recently, Frank's current books of fiction are available from David
R. Godine who has bought the Black Sparrow imprimatur. Her work,
along with books by D.H. Lawrence, Edward Dorn and Andrei Codrescu,
was one of the few selected from the Black Sparrow List to be featured
in Godine's recent catalogue. About Frank's work, Godine writes:
Few writers on the Black Sparrow list could be classified as "mainstream," that
is, as people whose fiction could (and in Frank's case probably
should) appear in The New Yorker. But these stories are just that,
reading like a cross between modern fairy tales and Kafkaesque
nightmares, stories in which the lines between reality and magic
are deliberately blurred, and the unexpected connection, the unintended
result, become commonplace. This probably sounds vaguely harrowing,
and it would be were it not for Frank's wit and her sense of humor.
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