Thirteen Fugues
Product Details
Date: May 03, 2011
Genre: Fiction
Format: Trade paperback, e-book
Price: US $13.95
# of Pages: 115 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-9844288-1-6
Thirteen Fugues has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award
Thirteen Fugues | Two Girls Review Experimental Novel Award, Finalist
World Records from Thirteen Fugues | Georgetown Review Fiction Award, Winner
Vertebrae from Thirteen Fugues | Writer’s Digest Fiction Award, Second Place Winner«
Spit Bugs from Thirteen Fugues | Story Magazine Naked Fiction Contest, Second Place Winner
Slipping from Thirteen Fugues | Story Magazine Short Short Fiction Contest, Second Place Winner
Fabrications from Thirteen Fugues | Glimmer Train Short Fiction Award, Finalist
Fugue
1. A musical composition in which one or more themes are introduced and then repeated in a complex pattern.
2. A psychological condition characterized by a trance state and the assumption of a new identity, sometimes accompanied by a physical or psychological journey to a previous location.
Tanya Irene Schwartz narrates her hilarious and conflicting desires through the musical and psychological structure of the fugue. Jewish law, world records, 9/11, Barbies, Viagra, sex, and sisters: these are the surprising sites of Tanya’s transformation from girl to woman. These short, intertwined stories explore religion, sex, and school, capturing the cadences and rhythms that mark our journey from adolescence to adulthood. Tanya’s vivid, humorous voice grants us a rare but strangely familiar view of what happens when we almost touch the divine.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of V, Burn, and The Mikvah Queen. She is the recipient of the Dana Award for the Novel, Story Magazine’s Short Fiction Award, and the Billy Heekin Foundation Award. Jennifer has received nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. For more info visit www.jennifernfink.com.
The 13 darkly comic pieces enclosed in Fink's fragmented tale represent a movement in narrator Tanya's life. Jewish identity, and Jewish guilt emerge as major themes, the latter made explicit when Tanya recalls a tour of Germany in which she lusts after a man and realizes "my fantasies always land me in the concentration camps." Reading Fink is like having access to the subconscious mind of a stranger who may well be mad. Part of you may not want to listen, but the desire to know what comes next is too strong. Publishers Weekly
The book doesn’t offer platitudes about guilt and innocence or about cause and effect in situations of violence and oppression; instead, it lets contradictions coexist, side by side, like a sidewalk “jeweled with broken glass.” Time Out New York
Thirteen Fugues is a lush, perverse enchantment, a creepy-pretty suburban fairy tale, all commonplace innocence and surreal hints and twists. Like peeking through a neighbor’s basement window, you can’t turn away from what you spy. Michelle Tea, Award-Winning author of Valencia and Rose of No Man’s Land
Jennifer Natalya Fink’s collection sparkles with radiant precision yet shifts and twists under inspection like some bejeweled quantum entanglement. D. Travers Scott, author of Love Hard: Stories 1989 – 2009
