Reviews
"These are very personal stories embedded in the public sphere—a deft braiding together of private life and the political and religious context in which desire unfolds. Margot Singer's collection of interlinked tales is full of both promise and delivery: a first-rate debut."
—Nicholas Delbanco, author of Spring and Fall
Description
This collection of linked short stories takes its title from the name of the western border region of the Russian empire within which Jews were required to live during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Susan, the stories’ main character, is a woman trapped in her own border region between youth and adulthood, familial roots in the Middle East and a typical American existence, the pull of Jewish tradition and the independence of a secular life.
In “Helicopter Days,” Susan discovers that the Israeli cousin she grew up with has joined a mysterious cult. “Lila’s Story” braids Susan’s memories of her grandmother--a German Jew arriving in Palestine to escape the Holocaust--with the story of her…
Margot Singer’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, including the Sun, AGNI, North American Review, and Ascent. She won Shenandoah’s Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay, was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and has received an NEA Literature Fellowship in Prose. Singer currently lives in Granville, Ohio, where she is an assistant professor of English at Denison University.
