Vanity Fair has called her book "as sharp and bright as stars." O, The Oprah Magazine says her stories "strikingly explore how small moments can influence personal and familial identity." And on April 14, she will be coming to Brown to read from her new book.
"Further Adventures in the Restless Universe," a collection of 21 short stories about the struggles of family life by Dawn Raffel '79, will be published by Dzanc Books and released Tuesday. Raffel has been critically acclaimed for her other works, which include the novel "Carrying the Body" and the collection of short stories "In the Year of Long Division."
Next month's event, which will take place at the McCormack Family Theatre at 7:30 p.m., was coordinated by the Literary Arts Program.
Professor Brian Evenson, chair of the Literary Arts Program, wrote of Raffel's past readings in an e-mail to The Herald, "Dawn is an excellent reader, almost hypnotic sometimes. She works so closely and so consciously with the dynamics of her fiction that by the time she reads a story aloud she's almost memorized it. I've seen her ‘read' a story without ever having to look at the page that the story is written on."
Raffel said the title of her newest book came from a memory of a book her father read to her as a child in place of bedtime stories. The book, "The Restless Universe" by Max Born, claimed to be a layman's guide to physics that even a child could understand, which her father took literally, she said. Hence, the title became a symbol of family and personal life.
The stories were influenced by the recent death of her parents, she said.
"Loosely, I guess all of my stories are about family," she said. " ‘In the Year of Long Division' is about the divide of impulses and of what we're trying to express," she added.
While many of the stories center around family issues, Raffel also said that her new book "is about different aspects of people trying to connect and understand each other."
As a way to promote her book, Raffel collaborated with Luca Dipierro, co-director of the film "60 Writers/60 Places," to create a short film resembling a trailer for one of the stories from the book, "The Heir and His Relatives." The bright and colorful images, set in a planetarium, are accompanied by voiceovers of Raffel reading lines from the story.
"The video took me by surprise," she said. "It was very impressionistic, and I liked what (Dipierro) did with it."
Raffel added that there are a lot of visual images in her work, and she believes they come from being surrounded by visual artists, particularly her sister and mother.
"I often start a work with a visual image that is charged for me in a way that I don't understand," she said. "The way to unpack it is through writing."
She added, "I write when I feel like I'm going to explode if I don't write."
Raffel said that "Further Adventures in the Restless Universe" shares stylistic elements with her prior works, "In the Year of Long Division," which is full of extremely compressed stories, and "Carrying the Body," which is written in very short vignettes.
As for upcoming works, Raffel just finished a memoir also in vignettes. She is unsure when the book will be published.
Despite the compactness of the stories, the book took Raffel a long time to complete. She began writing the stories in 2001, not realizing she would be writing a book.
"I revise by cutting," she said. "The book is very short, about a hundred pages."
Evenson, who has read both of Raffel's previous works, wrote, "I think Dawn has a remarkable attention to language, a real sense of rhythm and a genuine control of sound that makes her work a pleasure to read. No word feels wasted. She makes language palpable, but not at the expense of story and narrative progression."
A semiotics concentrator at Brown, Raffel said she had always wanted to write but did not start seriously until after college. She first was a fiction editor, and though she always had the desire to write, she said it was very hard to do so because she did not know what to write about.
"It's your life that gives you something to write about," she said.
Raffel said she wants her book to evoke emotions in its readers. She usually does not give her characters names so that they become more universal: The events in her stories can happen to any person.
