Jamie Callan Recommends

Leora Skolkin-Smith’s Edges was featured this year at the Virginia Festival of the Book, but it doesn’t seem to be noticed much. I hope more people will read it. Written in lyrical and arresting language, it bridges a rift between the “political” and the universal, telling a story about mothers and daughters and a young woman’s sexual awakening. The geography and tensions of Israel and Palestine before the Cold War are especially glowing in this book. Leora Skolkin-Smith is very gifted at expressing complex, nuanced moments with rare precision. I highly recommend this unusual and brief novel.”

Jamie Callan’s fiction has appeared in Best American Erotica 2002, The Missouri Review, Story Buzz Magazine, American Letters and Commentary, OntheBus, The Baffler, and Turnstile. Callan teaches fiction at Yale University, NYU, and Wesleyan University. She is also a Master Teaching Artist with the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.