"Dawn Raffel's stories are like prismatic drops of rain, hanging from
the edge of a roof or sliding down a windshield, reflecting an entire
world within. The language of motherhood, of adulthood, of childhood --
the language of family and individual -- has never been like this. Sly
and probing, with the sting of precision and pain." --Susan Straight
"In Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe the
oppressive truth of our mortality unsettles but does not vanquish the
spirit. The woman as drudge may be a failure at folding, but she is a
rare songmaker whose dialogues with a son, a sister -- the usual figures
from the family romance -- make for a musical and philosophical call and
response. The son proposes one way to keep birds from crashing into
fatally clear windows is to 'open the windows all over the world.' These
stories promise more life. Take them to heart!" --Christine Schutt
When Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her
nightly from The Restless Universe--a layman's guide to physics by the
Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her
father, she didn't--despite his statements to the contrary--comprehend a
word of the physics. It was her first recognition that love so often
comes with imperfect understanding.
The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are
about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers,
lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena,
and the way the heart warps time. Of her previous work, one reviewer
stated, "Raffel takes conventions and smashes them to bits" and another
called it "extreme literature." Of Further Adventures, Publisher's
Weekly says, "Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy
and grace."
Dawn Raffel is the author of a previous collection of short stories, In
the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her work
has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, NOON, Open City,
The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, Unsaid, and numerous other
periodicals and anthologies. She has taught creative writing in the MFA
program at Columbia University and is a magazine editor in New York
City.
"Readers have come to expect from Dawn Raffel's prose nothing less than
the syllable-by-syllable perfections of purest poetry and the boldest
wisdom a human heart can hold. Her new collection of pithy, exquisite
fictions about the timeless crises of mothers, daughters, and wives is
breathtaking and haunting in its majestic exactitudes." --Gary Lutz
"Less has never been more than in Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in
the Restless Universe. These spare, high-intensity stories of brave
people at the end of their ropes are not only models of writerly
integrity, but monuments of the spirit asserting itself out of the
depths of silence." - David Gates
