velvet_ink's profile

The fiction of Thaisa Frank, according to the New York Times, works “by a tantalizing sense of indirection.” The critic Don Skiles has described her stories as being “in the grand tradition of the fairy tale, the legend, the spell,” and the reviewer Rob Hurwitt has called her work “domestic magical realism.” She is the recipient of two PEN Awards, a two-time Bay Area Book Reviewer’s Association nominee and has been on the Bestseller List of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her two most recent books of fiction are SLEEPING IN VELVET (1998), and A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAMOUFLAGE (1992). Thaisa Frank’s work has appeared in anthologies, among the most recent of which is the Polish anthology ROZNE KSZTALTY MILOSCI, 2002 (ed. Agnieszka Kudyba, Wydawni…

The fiction of Thaisa Frank, according to the New York Times, works “by a tantalizing sense of indirection.” The critic Don Skiles has described her stories as being “in the grand tradition of the fairy tale, the legend, the spell,” and the reviewer Rob Hurwitt has called her work “domestic magical realism.” She is the recipient of two PEN Awards, a two-time Bay Area Book Reviewer’s Association nominee and has been on the Bestseller List of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her two most recent books of fiction are SLEEPING IN VELVET (1998), and A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAMOUFLAGE (1992). Thaisa Frank’s work has appeared in anthologies, among the most recent of which is the Polish anthology ROZNE KSZTALTY MILOSCI, 2002 (ed. Agnieszka Kudyba, Wydawnictwo Europa). FINDING YOUR WRITER’S VOICE, co-authored with Dorothy Wall, and published in l994, has been compared to Brenda Uleland’s book IF YOU WANT TO WRITE and has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish. Thaisa Frank has taught writing in the graduate department of San Francisco State, is on the part-time faculty at the University of San Francisco and has been Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Berkeley. She has served as a judge for the Djerassi Colony and the Oregon Council for the Arts, and has been on the staff of numerous writers’ conferences. Her fiction has also been translated into Finnish.

Recently, Frank’s current books of fiction are available from David R. Godine who has bought the Black Sparrow imprimatur. Her work, along with books by D.H. Lawrence, Edward Dorn and Andrei Codrescu, was one of the few selected from the Black Sparrow List to be featured in Godine’s recent catalogue. About Frank’s work, Godine writes:

“Few writers on the Black Sparrow list could be classified as “mainstream,” that is, as people whose fiction could (and in Frank’s case probably should) appear in The New Yorker. But these stories are just that, reading like a cross between modern fairy tales and Kafkaesque nightmares, stories in which the lines between reality and magic are deliberately blurred, and the unexpected connection, the unintended result, become commonplace. This probably sounds vaguely harrowing, and it would be were it not for Frank’s wit and her sense of humor.”

New Work: HarperCollins Reader’s Choice, New Directions Anthology, The New Review

Thaisa Frank is represented by The Ellen Levine Literary Agency.