In The Year Of Long Division: Stories

by Dawn Raffel

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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

117 pages, Hardcover

First published January 31, 1995

About the author

Dawn Raffel's illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, was a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Previous books include a critically acclaimed novel, Carrying the Body, and two story collections— Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division.

Her writing has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies—most recently The Best Short Fictions 2016 (selected by Stuart Dybek) and The Best Short Fictions 2015 (selected by Robert Olen Butler).

She was a fiction editor for many years, helped launch O, The Oprah Magazine, where she served as Executive Articles Editor for seven years, and subsequently held senior-level "at- large" positions at More magazine and Reader's Digest. In addition, she served as the Center for Fiction's web editor. She has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University, the Center for Fiction, and at Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania.

She currently works as an independent editor for individuals and creative organizations, specializing in memoir, short stories, and narrative nonfiction. She is also a certified yoga instructor and teaches embodied creative writing.

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney will be published by Blue Rider Press (a division of Penguin), July 31, 2018.

Reviews

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Year Of Long Division, Dawn Raffel has located the place where poetry and fiction meet; where the poetic accounting of sensations randomly scattered across the page moves the vagueness of a plotted- plotlessness forward. It is much about what is not said, the remainder of blank spaces appropriating room for the reader to gain the courage to enter.

P.68: "…I feel the after-rills of phrases, words between the words I am invariably failing to catch, "A curtain there…an arch…"

There is an experiment here, no an intention where she creates an experience not named, the atmosphere and physical sensations of a peaked memory. She intends to have it, plotless, embedded into our fiber where it cannot be gotten rid of. It is here that she succeeds.

This is a style that page after quickly turned page left me spellbound. Stories anguish past the borders of being alone and loneliness. These are lives dissected from themselves. They leave an inheritance of loneliness, an unequaled life of insecure visions of fragmented selves. She writes in the way life actually unfurls in its odd sequences of motion and sound, its lonely loop, rather than the etiquette of literature planted on a page.I was snared into this quiet pageant of life before I recognized it.

Poetry layered into meaning, it emboldened me to drift below within the opened spaces-between, deep beneath the curvature of words. Drift. Drift. Breathless. Spaces emptied, reaching to render an image, memory, fear, lapse, barely not reached. Each image evoking the next, its cumulative experience of absence, budding yet not there, past.

Throughout each compelling story boundaries are invaded. Safety is stalemated. Thrashed with the fine edges of a brush fathers linger enigmatic. Wisked in paints curling towards the invisible they trend into the essence of the incalculable, ciphers of brewing emptiness.

"She will master consonants, the hard hearts of words. Her curls will be shorn. "Papa?" she will say. Yearning is inbred. Longing for the missing will be mercilessly easy."

Her work not only points toward the absence of much of the totality of experience in language and the written word but also flattens experience due to the inherent cultural and historic limitations.( Delves into a Pessoan revelation which discarded his life but enhanced his existence.) It is only within her fragmented silences that meaning gathers.These silences bear witness to what generations attempt to evade and distract through the lure of an addictive convention.

In The Year Of Long Division may also be read a second or first time for the chambered beauty of her words, their echoes, resonance. Preferably this might be undertaken reading aloud while pacing to the rhythms of her prose. Try an older attic wreathed with the acoustics of cobwebs, the book and its burning incantations of silence held opened upon both hands.

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

There a number of stories within this beautiful collection that defy mere star ratings: the centerpiece, 'The Trick', being chief among them. Others, however, fell a little short, possibly more a fault of the reader's inattentive nature than the writer. Raffel's poetic prose is sublime. I feel very fond of this book, and will no doubt return to it many times. 4.5 over 5.

[David Winters · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is now online at the LA Review of Books: lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-other-life-that-is-ours-revisiting-dawn-raffel

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Compressed syntax is the primary technique of Raffel, a Gordon Lish disciple, and many of these stories were originally published in the Lish edited The Quarterly. Beautiful sentences abound, as do quirky anti-story gambits, and it's all fun and games for a spell. Ultimately, though, what's the point if the story doesn't pull through?

[Alissa Hattman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was moved and stunned by this dark, poetic collection of short fiction and microfiction. Condensed, raw sentences and surprising prose that captures the bleakness of growing up in the midwest. Here's a taste: "Rust. Spit. Lotion. Spit and polish, spray and wax gabardine going dotty in the closet, smells, plugs, the smell of Mother, and starch, and rutted underfoot wood, patent leather and nails, bleach, gum and balls of hair balls in the drain--this was our house. We girls were squealing-clean." So good!

[Ross Scott-Buccleuch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned half way.

[Nancy LePage · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly one of the worst books I've ever read.

I imagine the author wrote this book by taking each book off the shelf in her house and plucking every consecutive sentence from a different book and placing them into a sequence. Seriously. Or maybe she went through a dictionary and pointed at random words?!?!?

The sentences don't make any sense. The paragraphs don't make any sense. I have zero understanding of anything that happened in any of the stories in this book.

I have no idea how the author finished this and thought she was done. And then her editor read it and thought this really needed to be published. THE STORIES DON'T MAKE SENSE AT ALL!

I've read one novel worse than this one, and that is Beach Road by James Patterson and Peter de Jonge. That book is only worse than this book because the plot twist makes absolutely zero sense and comes in toward the end. This book sucked terribly the entire time, so at least I wasn't disappointed 95% of the way in when everything hit the fan.

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!!!!

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first started Raffel's debut collection (came out in 1995) I was pretty excited and stunned by her style. It's like a weird mash-up of clipped minimalism and poetic language. About half-way through though, I started to find it a little wearisome and slow. I think I would have liked more momentum, more story. Still, check out this sentence, from Somewhere Near Sea Level: "The ice, I see, is swept, wet, white."

[Les · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another student of Gordon Lish (along with Christine Schutte). So, that quirky, clever wordplay. Fun and challenging.