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ERICA OLSEN
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 are 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.
BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
RECAPTURE
& Other Stories
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.
“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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