Happy announce that we’ll be publicizing the forthcoming eBook publications of two critically-acclaimed books by Susan Daitch: Storytown and The Colorist. Each of the releases will feature new introductions. More about Susan Daitch and the books below:

Susan Daitch is the author of four works of fiction and her work was the subject of a recent issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Her short fiction has been included in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction, Tin House, Guernica, Bomb, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The Brooklyn Rail, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Her work has been the recipient of two Vogelstein awards, research grants from NYU, CUNY, a finalist for a Howard Foundation grant, the 2010 Failbetter Novella Award, and was awarded a 2012 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation of the Arts. Her novel L.C. won an NEA Heritage Award and was a Lannan Foundation Selection. She teaches at Hunter College. She lives in Brooklyn with her son.

STORYTOWN

​The distinctions between art and life are blurred in this unsettling and tantalizing first collection of short fiction by novelist Susan Daitch (The Colorist, L.C.). In fifteen stories, all concerning displacements of the ordinary, characters restore or duplicate art objects (legally and otherwise), dub dialogue for foreign films, and look to old movies for guidance. In the title story (based upon a legendary amusement park in upstate New York), a woman works at a children’s theme park, where Alice in Wonderland mourns for the Sheriff of Nottingham, who has joined the marines. From Dalkey Archive.

“Startling in their intelligence and the breadth of their reimagining history the stories in Storytown are carefully detailed narratives that resist the comforts of traditional narrative devices.
—James Surowiecki, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

​”These are fine and moving stories about the death of meaning, about persons trying to decode the seas of signals in which they float and drown, failing. Their flaw is their triumph: they try — and so the stories are also about courage, that most tragic of virtues. This is an important collection by one of the most intelligent and attentive writers at work in the U.S. today.”
—David Foster Wallace

​”Daitch’s stories are packed with packed with historical, philosophical and artistic references and jammed with signs and meanings. They also have a forward momentum and aren’t in the least bit stogy. In her playful manipulation of genres and her cool essayistic style, she’s surely a direct descendent of Borges. With these stories, …Daitch reveals herself to be a supremely accomplished writer who combines erudition with social conscience in a matchless tone of slightly pained irony.”
—Charlotte Innes, L.A. Weekly

THE COLORIST

A dazzling, elegantly funny, multilayered novel by one of the most imaginative young writer to emerge from postmodern New York.  The Colorist is the story of Julie who make her living filling in panels of a comic book, of Electra, a displaced comic book heroine, and the gifted and felonious inhabitants of the urban shadowland where art and commerce intersect.

​​”Now that we’re in the midst of a renaissance of interest in cartoons and comics, here’s a story set in the comic book industry, complete with workaday details. But The Colorist aims more to confound clichés than to copy them. The novel is a complex of refracted story lines that rewrite and revise the tales of a few ‘discontinued’ characters. The Colorist should be read for Ms. Daitch’s drop dead writing style and the pleasure of joining her literary shell game.”
—Kate Lynch, The New York Times​

“An observant eye… Her vision of New York is one of a cartoon city where anything is possible, where real-life adventures resemble the antic happenings of a comic strip.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times​

“The Colorist is lush, dense; a book of dreamlike intensity, one where we must listen for the echoes to understand the patterns. Check it out. Really worthwhile/​highly recommended.”
—David Ulin, The Los Angeles Reader