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Thaisa Frank grew up in the Midwest
and the Bronx, the granddaughter of a Presbyterian theologian
and a Rumanian Chassid, who consulted each other about Aramaic
texts. Her father was a professor of medieval English and her
mother a director of small theater groups.
Her fiction, characterized by the critic Rob Hurwitt as “domestic
magical realism,” inevitably draws on a bi-cultural childhood
in which, for two thirds of the year, she lived in a sedate suburb
of Illinois and for a third of the year in the colorful, immigrant
world of New York. In her stories, men glow in the dark, the
letter writer for Howard Hughes reveals his passions, a woman
camouflages herself as furniture, a child has too many mothers
to remember, and two circus performers go through the eye of
a needle. Her collections also include novellas that take place
in the Midwest and reveal the journey of a family. Upcoming work
is a novel about a nearly mythical haven in the holocaust the
safety of which is threatened forever.
She earned an honors degree in philosophy of science and logic
from Oberlin College, studied graduate linguistics and philosophy
at Columbia and worked as a psychotherapist before becoming a
fulltime writer. She has traveled extensively in France and England,
and currently lives in Oakland, California.
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