Sleeping in Velvet
from Black Sparrow:
In A Brief History of Camouflage, Thaisa Frank's critically
acclaimed first fullscale collection of stories, established
her reputation as one of those writers with a special gift
for exploring the dreamlike abyss of distances, discontinuities
and attractions across which contemporary relationships are
negotiated. This collection of stories, suggested Small Press
Magazine, brilliantly examines the detachment within intimacy
which seems to plague men and women today.
Franks examination of the blurred lines between enchantment
and illusion develops new magic-realist resonances in this
second collection, which contains twenty-three stories as well
as a novella -- all new writing, and all once again oddly beautiful,
hallucinatory, mysterious (The Review of Contemporary Fiction)
in its subtle calibration of the inner spaces and silences
separating people, and the haunting undercurrents of feeling
that hold them together.
In the concluding novella, The Mapmaker weaves short narratives
together into a meditation upon the gleaming fragments of memory
that make up private history. 'I know my mother the way I know
the air. I know her the way I know cats who come for an evening
and then live on. I know her the way I know a garden in Kansas,
over thirty years ago, brimming with lilacs and a rough stone
birdbath.' (from 'Eating'). |
