In the Year of Long Division

"Raffel has the ability to turn the tiniest details into poetry." -  Publisher's Weekly

Dawn Raffel's debut delivers us to the wild spaces of a youth in the Midwest and to the blank terrors of the heart. There is a cold wind blowing through these stories, whose sentences come to us as a rebuke to anything felt. In her flight from sentiment, Raffel masterfully reifies the new will to absence that marks the moral and emotional bearing of her generation. 

The result is not just an acknowledgment of all our long divisions - the divide between impulse and the means to apprehend it, between desire and entrapment - but of the final sweet concession that we must each of us make to the futility of even the smallest mending. 

In The Year Of Long Division gives us the triumph of craft over the obstinance of expression and the installation of a writer certain to be cited in the continuing reinvention of the American short story.  

Dawn Raffel is a writer, developmental editor, and creative writing teacher. She is currently the fiction editor of the Northwest Review and works as an independent editor for individuals and creative organizations. She has taught at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, The New York Public Library, Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Vilnius,Tblisi, Montreal), and most recently International Literary Seminars (Nairobi and Lamu, Kenya). She serves as an emerging writer mentor at the Center for Fiction in New York and for AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs).