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Daphne Kalotay, author of The Archivists, in conversation with Julie Rold
May 17, 2023 @ 6:00 pm–7:00 pm
Porter Square Books is pleased to welcome Daphne Kalotay, author of The Archivists, for an event in conversation with Julie Rold! This event will take place on Wednesday, May 17 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (25 White St. Cambridge, MA 02140).
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Winner of the 2021 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction
The characters in The Archivists are everyday people, but when private losses or the shocks of history set their worlds reeling, they find connection and liberation in surprising, buoyant ways. Winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, this vibrant collection brings transcendence, wry humor, and a touch of the uncanny to life’s absurdities and catastrophes—whether the 2008 economic crash, fallout after the 2016 presidential election, gentrification, pandemic lockdown, illness, or the intergenerational impacts of the Holocaust and Communist occupation of Eastern Europe.
A hardheaded realist is confronted by both her mortality and a would-be wizard. A thirteen-year-old girl in 1950s Toronto infiltrates the ranks of Bell Canada. A ninety-nine-year-old woman appears to be invincible. A group hikes in Germany, and a solitary woman is pursued on a walk in New Mexico. These deeply moving stories ingeniously consider issues of identity, history, and memory and our shared search for meaning in an off-kilter world.
Published in 20+ languages, Daphne Kalotay’s books include the award-winning novels Sight Reading, Russian Winter and Blue Hours, and two story collections: The Archivists, winner of the Grace Paley Prize, and Calamity and Other Stories, shortlisted for The Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo, she teaches at Princeton University.
Julie Rold is a fiction writer and playwright whose work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, the Best New Voices collection and also named for a Pushcart Prize. Her theatrical work has been produced at the Boston Center for the Arts and the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. A winner of Artist Grants in playwriting and fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she has received other awards for her writing, including from the St. Botolph Foundation, the Steelgrass Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and has twice been among the winners of the Faulkner-Wisdom Award for Novella. She is currently Professor of English at Berklee College of Music and a faculty member in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts.