Dzanc

$15.95/ 180 pgs.

“The novella,” Ian McEwan writes, “is the perfect form of prose fiction.” And yet, McEwan laments in his short essay, ‘Some Notes on the Novella,’ published in The New Yorker last October, an overwhelming number of writers find themselves “slaves to the giant” i.e. the novel – “instead of masters of the form.”

Not so Jen Michalski.

Michalski, a Baltimore-based writer and editor, knows exactly what she is doing when it comes to choosing form to suit a particular narrative function. The author of two short story collections, From Here, and Close Encounters, her first novel, The Tide King won the 2012 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press this spring. In the meantime, last month Dzanc Books released Could You Be With Her Now, a stunning pair of disparate but resonant novellas that showcase not only her enormous range but also the form in its tidy splendor.

While on the surface these works seems worlds apart, emotionally the characters are united by loss, alienation, and their desire to be understood. At the center of it all is Michalski’s masterful hand, at once compassionate and unflinching, possessed of extraordinary, aesthetic restraint. What she has given us are two lean bodies of incredible depth and ambition. Compression wins out at every turn, so that each word feels integral, without sacrificing her tremendous ear for language. The umbrella title for the two novellas, Could You Be With Her Now, comes from a line in the second pertaining to a fleeting, fiery romance with a lover, long dead, and speaks to the ache of impossible love, a current that runs through both stories. Both novellas hinge on the feeling, expressed by Alice, a character from the second novella, May-September:  

Something had been lost, or taken, or was never hers to begin with, even though she realized with a ferocity that she had wanted it more than anything. Continue reading →