spuytenduyvil

This Snail’s Song is a refined encapsulation of all the beauty and sadness in the world; a true tour-de-force of imagination and sincerity.

         Alex Epstein, author of Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time

 

Alta Ifland’s short stories work from the energy of defamiliarization, as some of the best pieces of literature do.  Her language is sweet, chatty and seductive, and when a reader gets comfortably situated in her world, like a mouse in cheese, she catapults her or him into another, ‘dangerously’ different perspective.  The world of Ifland’s stories is made of opposites: it’s warm and chilly, deeply humane and strangely absurd, gentle and rough, humorous and sad.”

      Dubravka Ugresic on Elegy for a Fabulous World

 

Alta Ifland's uncanny tales merge the child's innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth. A gone world prospers in the real time of memory, its immediacies restored, its deeper significance coming clear like a shape disclosed by the archeologist's pick.

     Sven Birkerts on Elegy for a Fabulous World

 

In the fabulous world elegized by Alta Ifland, what is usually understood by living or being is nothing more than a series of moments in anyone's life, harvested by consciousness and recreated by memory.  […] the stories in Elegy for a Fabulous World are remarkable: intriguing, quirky, bizarre, terse, never boring and always profoundly humane and human.

     2010 Northern California Book Awards Jury

 

In most of the stories in this wonderfully disorienting collection, [Ifland] demonstrates a fabulist take that allows only precarious footing in the quotidian.

     Peter Grandbois, Rain Taxi, on Death-in-a-Box

 

In transplanting her painterly European sensibility into an American poetic context, Alta Ifland creates and redreams the hauntingly surreal emotional landscapes of dislocation, desolate distances, and Redonesque disjuncture from which she shapes these ever-shifting, mad-and-mythic excursions—in voices angry, awed, childlike, sardonic, she startles and disturbs, charms and exalts.

     Wanda Coleman on Voice of Ice