Terese Svoboda

The many faces of Svoboda's luminous writing include eleven books of poetry, fiction, translation and over 100 short stories. Trailer Girl and Other Stories, her third novel, was reissued in paper last fall. “Unnerve thyself: the violent and enthralling short stories in Trailer Girl detonate on contact,” writes Vanity Fair. Her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent was termed "Astounding!" by the New York Post, selected as a Japan Times "Best of Asia 2008" book, and won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Praised as a "fabulous fabulist" by Publishers Weekly for her last novel, Tin God, Vogue lauded her first, Cannibal, as a female Heart of Darkness. Svoboda is also the recipient of the Bobst Prize (for Cannibal), the Iowa Prize for poetry and the O. Henry Award for the short story. Her work has been selected for the "Writer's Choice" column in the New York Times Book Review, a SPIN magazine book of the year, and one of the Voice Literary Supplement's ten best reads. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.'s Disney Hall in 2005. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, Bennington, Davidson, University of Hawaii, U. of Miami, Fairleigh Dickinson, Williams College, San Francisco State College and the College of William and Mary and is teaching fiction this spring at Columbia’s School of the Arts.

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Pirate Talk or Mermalade

Terese Svoboda

Release Date: September 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0982631805

Price: $14.95

eBook Price: $7.99

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DESCRIPTION

Pirate Talk or Mermalade is a novel in voices about two brothers who meet a mermaid, fall into pirating, and end up in the Arctic. Henry Hudson said "mermaids are as thick as shrimp in these parts," and it was the Arctic where fellow explorer (and pirate) Martin Frobisher dropped off part of his crew.

 

 PRAISE FOR TERESE SVOBODA'S PREVIOUS BOOKS

"Astounding!" —The New York Post on Black Glasses Like Clark Kent

"Violent and enthralling." —Vanity Fair on Trailer Girl

"Desperate, chilling, seductive." —Vogue on Cannibal

"A true American original." —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

"A writer of real power and mystery." —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask


REVIEWS

"Told entirely through dialogue, this quirky tale of period pirate wannabes makes a jeu d'esprit of the privateer life even as it baldly de-romanticizes it. Its protagonists, two unnamed brothers (one of whom might not be male), put out to sea from their Nantucket home in 1718 bedazzled by fantasies of gold doubloons and buccaneer booty. Over the next decade, capture by pirates, shipboard slaughter, maiming and dismemberment, slavery, sodomy, shipwreck on a desert island, and getting stranded in the Arctic all follow in due course. Svoboda plays these travails mostly for laughs, presenting them as ongoing pratfalls in the brothers' klutzy comedy of errors. Periodic visits from a mermaid (perhaps their half-sister) and a parrot who steals the scene every time he croaks 'Hanged!' add to the fun." —Publisher's Weekly

"this book does not shiver, does not waiver, does not thin, and reading it is to see how our brightest and best writers can stretch beyond what we think realistic or probable on the page." —J.A. Tyler, elimae

"Pirate Talk and Mermalade is immediately engaging, with prose that is breath-taking yet easy to read. Short and deft, I devoured this novel, and expect that many others will enjoy doing the same." —Alex Myers, NewPages

"This book is something entirely new: a novella that’s also a sort of poetry, a poetry that’s also almost a stageplay. Pirate Talk is a strange and nastily beautiful book." —Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions