Sleeping in Velvet

by Thaisa Frank

Book Overview

The blurred lines between enchantment and illusion takes on new magic-realist resonances in this collection of twenty-three stories and a novella. Ms. Frank creates subtle calibrations of the inner spaces and silences separating people, and the haunting undercurrents of feeling that hold them together. In the concluding novella, The Map Maker, those undercurrents exert an especially powerful tow, washing up a lost cargo of familial misunderstandings.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1574230433
• ISBN13: 9781574230437
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Slices of life, exquisitely captured

Wow, where has this author been all my life? Turns out she lives in my neighborhood, Oakland, so perhaps I'll run into her at Peet's coffee near the Claremont some day.I don't usually read short stories, but these aren't exactly short stories. Rather, they are mood pieces, exquisite slices of life captured with lovely language. Most of them made me stop at the end, look out the window, and sigh with a smile before getting up to refill my coffee cup. The title story, The White Coat, is about an ermine fur coat once used to hide Jews fleeing from the Nazis; when Frank's character tries on the coat, she disappears for a time, lending a slightly slippery quality to the story. She uses this somewhat otherworldly aspect in some of her other stories, too, which only heightens their lyrical and magical qualities. Absolutely lovely.