Thaisa Frank

Books by Thaisa Frank

Heidegger's Glasses

Sleeping in Velvet

by Thaisa Frank

Black Sparrow Pr, 1997-09.

A Brief History of Camouflage

by Thaisa Frank

Black Sparrow Press, 1992.

Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide ...

by Thaisa Frank, Dorothy Wall

St. Martin's Griffin, 1996.

Enchantment: New and Selected Stories

by Thaisa Frank

Counterpoint, 2012.

About Me

Upcoming stories: Great Jones Street, Strange Attractions, ed. Edie Meidev

"The New Thieves" winner of international fiction prize, celebrating Flash Fiction Day

Enchantment Counterpoint Press 2012, Best Books SF Chronicle

3-time Pushcart nominee
3-time nominee NCRA

Forthcoming novel, Heidegger's Glasses (in the fall) see description below. (Counterpoint Press; foreign rights sold to Italy, Holland, Norway, Spain, France, Poland, Portugal and Brazil.

Thaisa Frank's short stories have received two PEN awards and her two most recent collections Sleeping in Velvet, (1998) and A Brief History of Camouflage, (1992) have been on the Bestseller List of the San Francisco Chronicle and were nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewer's Association Award. A Brief History of Camouflage was included in Dalton's New Voices. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Harper Collins' Reader's Choice. Frank has also written Finding Your Writer's Voice, co-authored with Dorothy Wall. It has been compared to Brenda Uleland's book, If You Want To Write and has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish. She 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. Recently, Frank penned an afterword for Voltaire's Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories.

Why do you write?

I think there are different animals in the world. Logician-animals. Anthropology-animals. Mechanic-animals. Entrepreneur-animals. Etc. When I wrote my first story at eight I knew I was a writer-animal, but I tried to escape my species. Vanished into philosophy of science, then becane a therapist. Eventually threw in the towel and wrote my first book--a collection of prose poems the size of a Hallmark greeting card that made some Best Books lists. I wrote something longer. And then something longer. Yet I don't know what fuels my creativity. Perhaps I'm hanging out at the pneumatic tube of the imagination when some other writer isn't so I get a title or a phrase and beat it it like a pinata until a book falls out.

Any favorite authors? Books?

I like all the gloomy eastern Europeans. Kafka and Schulz, for example. And Boll, Gogol, and Celan. I also like Borges and Manguel. And I.B. Singer's short stories. (He was definitely a magic realist in the best sense--perhaps better than many of the South American writers.) And Monterosso.
Indebted to Joyce--especially The Sisters in The Dubliners because it's a great example of how there can be almost no plot but increasing momentum and narrative arc.
Always have liked As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) and (like so many women) Pride and Prejudice. A great fan of some Scandinavian writers (Sigrid Undset and Par Lagerqvist). I love poetry--too numerous to mention. Wallace Stevens and his ideas about imagination no doubt made me feel less lonely as a teenager. I love William Stafford. The last novel I read that captivated me was Remainder by Tom McCarthy--a British writer whose book was first published in the Paris underground, became a cult hit, then migrated back to England and finally to America. I like writing that gives me the sense that narrative is unfolding in real space and time and I am inside of it.