RECAPTURE
& Other Stories
by Erica Olsen
October 2012 | Short Fiction | 978-1-937226-05-3 | 165 pp | $15.95
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ERICA OLSEN lives in the Four Corners area, where she does archives and curation work for archaeology museums. A graduate of Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Montana MFA program, she has also been a Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. Her short fiction has appeared in ZYZZYVA, High Desert Journal, and other publications, and her nonfiction pieces in magazines including Fine Books & Collections and High Country News. Her work has received awards including the 2011 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose (for “Grand Canyon II,” included in Recapture).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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In the stories of Recapture, a curator preserves silences in glass jars, a woman works in a larger-than-life-size replica of the Grand Canyon, a hug from a King Kong costume-clad unknown sparks an epiphany on the Empire State Building, and a bookmobile trundles through the deserts of southeastern Utah, its innards full of Jane Austen novels. Archaeology and history, love and loneliness, identity and preservation all wind through the collection, blurring the lines between the natural world and the world we create.
PRAISE FOR RECAPTURE
A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION OF THE YEAR
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“Unsentimental stories that tell us what the American West looks like now and what we’ve lost; the Grand Canyon, for instance, can be seen only in replica after environmental catastrophe.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL
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“Erica Olsen gives us the dream life of the Southwest in this striking collection, a landscape told in language as spare and pungent and exacting as the desert itself. A swift and lovely debut from a writer of real gifts.”
—KEVIN CANTY, author of Where the Money Went
“These sly, heartbreaking stories capture the modern West, where the past is ever-present and the future is already here.”
—ALISON BAKER, author of How I Came West, and Why I Stayed
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“Beneath their polished surfaces, Erica Olsen’s stories are subversive, sometimes darkly funny, and always disquieting.”
—SUSAN LOWELL HUMPHREYS, author of Ganado Red