Anca Szilagyi, "Daughters of the Air" & Gint Aras, "The Fugue"

We are celebrating Anca Szilagyi's new book Daughters of the Air at the Book Cellar with Gint Aras (The Fugue).

About Anca Szilagyi:

Anca L. Szilágyi's debut novel is Daughters of the Air (Lanternfish Press). Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Gastronomica, and Fairy Tale Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the inaugural Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, a Made at Hugo House fellowship, and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. She grew up in Brooklyn and currently lives in Seattle with her husband.

About Daughters of the Air:

"Pluta" Spektor was a happy, if awkward, young girl-until her father was disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War. Sent to a boarding school outside New York City, Pluta wrestles alone with the unresolved tragedy and at last runs away: to the streets of Brooklyn in 1980, where she figuratively-and literally-spreads her wings.

About Gint Aras:

Gint Aras has been trapped on planet earth since 1973. His novel, The Fugue, called “magisterial” by the Chicago Tribune and “a masterpiece of literary fiction” by Centered on Books, was a finalist for the 2016 Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year. His prose and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including the St. Petersburg Review, Hypertext, Curbside Splendor, Quarterly West and others. He lives in Oak Park, IL with his family.

About The Fugue:

After over a decade in prison, a young sculptor, Yuri Dilienko, returns to his old neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. He finds the town stripped of so many places he used to know, while the town's familiar streets, bricks and steeples trigger memories of his traumatic youth. To convalesce, he sculpts from collected scrap metal, but his arrival in town soon rouses a young girl, Lita Avila, to curiosity. Could this reclusive and oddly quiet man, whose art is sensitive yet intense, truly be guilty of setting fire to his parents' bungalow and burning them alive? At once an homage to the urban grit of Nelson Algren and the family sagas of Leo Tolstoy, The Fugue is a true epic that spans three generations and over fifty years, a major new achievement in the history of Chicago literature. It considers the effects of war and the silent, haunting traumas inherited by children of displaced refugees. Gint Aras's lucid yet lyrical prose braids and weaves a tale where memory and imagination merge, time races and drags, and identity collapses and shifts without warning.