Daphne Kalotay with Julie Zuckerman

Join bestselling author Daphne Kalotay as a guest on the Literary Modiin Author Series, hosted by Julie Zuckerman! This event also features Michael Golding, author of Quick Bright Things, and poet Yoni Hammer-Kossoy. This is a virtual event, register here: https://bit.ly/3OMcpry

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.

DAPHNE KALOTAY is the author of Calamity and Other Stories—shortlisted for the Story Prize—and the award-winning novels Russian Winter, Sight Reading, and Blue Hours. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She teaches at Princeton University and makes her home in Somerville, Massachusetts.