Thaisa Frank | Author

Thaisa Frank
In this spell-like, poetic fiction the fantastic is never far from the ordinary..

Latest News & Events

View all»

Chew on This

Apr.18.2012

Chew on This

Hey--

A chanct to support the Santa Rosa Library and eat dinner with authors emerging from their hermitages, happy to be with people and talk about their work.

Wine-country food.

Awesome ambience.

Wine and h'or d'ouvres at 6:15. Dinner at 7:30.

Featured Works

View all»

Previous Pause Next

PUBLISHED: Nov.01.2010

Heidegger's Glasses

Heidegger’s Glasses opens during the end of World War II in a failing Germany coming apart at its seams. The Third Reich’s obsession with record-keeping and its strong reliance on the occult has led to the formation of an underground compound of scribes--translators responsible for answering letters written to those eventually killed in the concentration camps. The original...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

VOLTAIRE Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories. With a New Afterward by Thaisa Frank

PUBLISHED: Jan.06.2009

Candide Zadig, and selected stories- Voltaire

This is Viking/Penguin's (Signet Classics) new edition of Candide. Some of his stories in this volume are remarkably short--really a form of flash fiction--and give the reader an opportunity to see a side of Voltaire that is harder to see in Candide or Zadig. In the Afterward, I explore the notion that although Voltaire's plots are predictable and some of his targets are obvious...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jul.10.2012

Enchantment: New and Selected Stories

The short fiction of Thaisa Frank has captivated readers for two decades, and now many of those pieces are collected in one volume, along with several new stories. In the title story, a lonely mother and housewife orders an enchanted man from a website called The Wondrous Traveler, who arrives with instructions for use and a list of frequently asked questions about enchantment...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Sep.01.1997

Sleeping In Velvet

I'm always impaling myself on silver things, things my lover gives me when I'm not looking. He buys me silver rings and puts them on me when I'm asleep. He buckles my waist with a silver belt, drapes me with silver necklaces, fastens anklets under my jeans, puts six earrings in the holes of my ears. Silver and never gold, because silver is the color of the accident one longs for....

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Dec.15.1996

Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction

An illuminating guide to finding one's most powerful writing tool, Finding Your Writer's Voice helps writers learn to hear the voices that are uniquely their own. Mixing creative inspiration with practical advice about craft, the book includes chapters on: Accessing raw voice Listening to voices of childhood, public and private voices, and colloquial voices Working in first and...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Dec.01.1991

A Brief History of Camouflage

In the spell-like, poetic fiction of Thaisa Frank, the fantastic is never far from the ordinary: her characters glimpse other worlds in their rear-view mirrors, receive postcards from long-dead friends, and take lovers who literally glow in the dark, their mustaches filaments, their pubic hair incandescent. Call it domestic magical realism, call it the work of a West Coast I.B....

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

Thaisa's Latest Blogs

View all»

May.14.2012 - 12:08 pm

Avoiding the List: A way to get unstuck and discover language

There are many lists that I have that potentially keep me from writing. There are, of course, cleaning the desk, remembering to feed the cat, e-mail discussions with SOs...

Apr.18.2012 - 2:25 pm

More thoughts on No Pulitzer in Fiction

Whatever the circumstances the failure to give a Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a curious metaphor in an age in which we are fed more and more "given" narratives about the world,...

Mar.29.2012 - 8:33 am

Vampires & The World of the Imagination

I know, I know: Vampires are no longer the rage, and zombies are in. But this one called to me, and if a vampire calls to you, how can you not respond? This...

Mar.27.2012 - 3:21 pm

Writing clothes

Silence seems to be the bedfellow of language: The less I talk, the more I write. So when I work on a book, I have a hard time talking about what I'm doing,except in...

Comments from Thaisa

May.17.2012 - 5:44 pm

In response to: The “Secret” Red Room Method and Red Room’s History

great secret history

Only...I really wish it had started in Tanzania....

May.14.2012 - 7:37 pm

In response to: Avoiding the List: A way to get unstuck and discover language

Thank you

Michael, great to know that there are fellow travelers in this circuitous profession!

Apr.26.2012 - 1:55 pm

In response to: The Word and The Thing Itself: Pointing Toward the Moon

thank you

Frank...I see I never thanked you for this great comment. Thanks, now! I hope all is well and your writing...

Nov.02.2011 - 7:50 pm

In response to: How I Lost My Innocence and Fell in Love with the Mac

Belated thank-you.....

Annette...Many thanks for your comment. It's nice to know that someone else feels the same way. And I hope...

Oct.24.2011 - 3:39 pm

In response to: The Order of Imagination/The Imagination of Order

thanks again

Yes. The stretch of the imagination is amazing

Writing

View all»

Heidegger's Glasses-prologue to the novel Heidegger's Glasses

Short Story: Kiss

The New Thieves (a prose poem)

Published Reviews

View all»

Nov.02.2010

Published by Huffington Post

We seem to learn so little from our mistakes. Voltaire wrote that "history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes." In her first novel, Heidegger's Glasses (...

Audio & Video

View all»

Video: Litquake-Feminine Wiles

Video: Heidegger's Glasses: Interview

Video: Poland: Literary Death Match

About Thaisa

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...

Read full bio »