The Archivists
Stories
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2021 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction
Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award
The characters in The Archivists are everyday people, but when private losses or the shocks of history set their worlds reeling, they find connection and liberation in surprising, buoyant ways. This vibrant collection brings transcendence, wry humor, and a touch of the uncanny to life’s absurdities and catastrophes—whether the 2008 economic crash, fallout after the 2016 presidential election, gentrification, pandemic lockdown, illness, or the intergenerational impacts of the Holocaust and Communist occupation of Eastern Europe.
A hardheaded realist is confronted by both her mortality and a would-be wizard. A thirteen-year-old girl in 1950s Toronto infiltrates the ranks of Bell Canada. A ninety-nine-year-old woman appears to be invincible. A group hikes in Germany, and a solitary woman is pursued on a walk in New Mexico. These deeply moving stories ingeniously consider issues of identity, history, and memory and our shared search for meaning in an off-kilter world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Kalotay's luminous collection (after the novel Blue Hours), characters seek out sources of hope while dealing with trauma and upheaval. "Relativity" follows Robert, a Boston social worker assigned to help Holocaust survivors claim restitution from the German government, among them a 74-year-old Swiss man energized by the chance to "stick it to the Germans." Another client, a 99-year-old woman, sensing correctly that Robert has marital problems, finds purpose by preparing Robert a meal. The title story comprises a series of linked vignettes in which a Holocaust survivor celebrates her birthday with her children and grandchildren, a young ballet student struggles to learn an antiwar piece titled Forced March, and a team of researchers study the effects of intergenerational trauma on Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In "Communicable," set during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a woman named Marlo invites her new boyfriend, Leland, to stay with her to avoid the isolation that seems to have affected her colleagues' mental health, despite the couple's differences and Marlo's foreboding observation that Leland's eyes, which used to seem "dreamy," now look "severe" when he wears a mask. There's real power in these stories, and it comes from Kalotay's perceptive writing and ability to wring narrative power from the smart use of understatement. This writer is at the top of her game.
