Dawn Raffel

Dawn Raffel's newest book is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. She is also the author of a novel, Carrying the Body, and a previous collection, In the Year of Long Division. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More magazine; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University. She now works part time at Readers Digest as Editor at Large, Books, and is completing a memoir. She lives outside New York City with her husband and sons and can be reached at Dawn@​Raffel.name.

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Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

Dawn Raffel

 

March 1, 2010 · Dzanc Books

Trade Paperback

120 pages ·  6.4" x 8"

$14.95 · ISBN 978-0976717799

 

 

 

CONTACT

Author: Dawn Raffel

Publishers: Steven Gillis and Dan Wickett

 

Press Release (PDF)

Book Cover (Web Quality)

Book Cover (Print Quality)

Author Photo (Web Quality)

Author Photo (Print Quality)

 

DESCRIPTION

When Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her nightly from The Restless Universe--a layman's guide to physics by the Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her father, she didn't--despite his statements to the contary--comprehend a word of the physics. It was her first recognition that love so often comes with imperfect understanding.

The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time. Of her previous work, one reviewer stated, "Raffel takes conventions and smashes them to bits," and another called it "extreme literature." Of Further Adventures, Publishers Weekly says, "Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace."

 

ADVANCE PRAISE

Dawn Raffel's stories are like prismatic drops of rain, hanging from the edge of a roof or sliding down a windshield, reflecting an entire world within. The language of motherhood, of adulthood, of childhood — the language of family and individual — has never been like this. Sly and probing, with the sting of precision and pain. 

—Susan Straight

In Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe the oppressive truth of our mortality unsettles but does not vanquish the spirit. The woman as drudge may be "a failure at folding," but she is a rare songmaker whose dialogues with a son, a sister — the usual figures from the family romance — make for a musical and philosophical call and response. The son proposes one way to keep birds from crashing into fatally clear windows is to "open the windows all over the world." These stories promise more life. Take them to heart!

—Christine Schutt

Readers have come to expect from Dawn Raffel’s prose nothing less than the syllable-by-syllable perfections of purest poetry and the boldest wisdom a human heart can hold. Her new collection of pithy, exquisite fictions about the timeless crises of mothers, daughters, and wives is breathtaking and haunting in its majestic exactitudes.

—Gary Lutz

Less has never been more than in Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. These spare, high-intensity stories of brave people at the end of their ropes are not only models of writerly integrity, but monuments of the spirit asserting itself out of the depths of silence.

—David Gates, author of The Wonder of the Invisible World

 

REVIEWS

The stories in Dawn Raffel's astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc) as as sharp and bright as stars.

--Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair


Raffel’s work sits comfortably with that of authors like Amy Hempel and Diane Williams: Her prose is intense enough to make even everyday topics seem fire-hot.


--Time Out New York