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Further Adventures in the Restless Universe
When Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her nightly from The Restless Universe—a layman’s guide to physics by the Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her father, she didn’t—despite his statements to the contrary—comprehend a word of the physics. It was her first recognition that love so often comes with imperfect understanding.
The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time.
The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time.
120 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2010
2 people are currently reading
204 people want to read
About the author
Dawn Raffel
17 books83 followersDawn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 10, 2010
When Michael Kimbell said that "nobody is writing sentences" like Dawn Raffel's sentences, he was not exaggerating. Her lines, her stories, are spiky things that don't sit easily in the hand. I felt a peculiar sort of stress as I read Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, newly published by Dzanc Books; I was confronted with how the stories resist simple narrative and scene and dialogue, while at the same time luring me in with their intoxicating mood, the emotive power behind miscommunication, and the uncertain standing her characters--like us readers--have in the world. There is something precise and potent in Raffel's brief tales of family, lovers, and attempts to connect (twenty-one stories are collected in this 100-page book); each tale is a portal to the tender points that serve as a harmonic to our everyday talk and our deep memory.
Raffel focuses especially on speech; there are a lot of verbal exchanges here that are often manifested in one-word banter. In her conversation with Kimball, Raffel said that this minimalist approach to dialogue is intended to convey how most of us only hear a word or two of what others say. What is on the page, then, is what sticks for these characters. For readers navigating the exchanges, we experience both a rawness and mutedness to this filtered kind of conversation: what is heard and, sometimes, meant, is set in high relief, while the lack of contextual words and verbal filler that we are accustomed to in speech gives these exchanges a dream-like, underwater feel.
At the same time, even outside of the speech in Raffel's stories, her writing is patently sonic; it is evident that she hears every syllable of her stories. To read them is to defamiliarize these syllables, to meet them again, anew.
"Visible light covers only about one octave, speaking in musical terms." That's the epigraph for Further Adventures, a translated quote from Max Born's The Restless Universe--which Raffel's father used to read to her when she was young, and of which she understood nearly nothing. Like Born, Raffel's book is interested in alternative octaves; as a reader, the temptation to stick with what is visible, what we are familiar with in traditional storytelling, exacerbates the awe we feel when confronted with ... let us call it the invisible light. What we see there, what rhymes and dissents from what we know in the visible light, feels essential.
This is a collection that operates on its own pitch, its own time, its own light. It is "minimal" storytelling only in it that is says nothing extra; little galaxies are contained in these spare stories.
For an unconventional collection of short stories published by an indie press, it is both surprising and pleasing to see it reviewed in high-profile places; no doubt that this is in part due to Raffel's career as a magazine editor in New York. Among the responses:
* Vanity Fair: "The stories in Dawn Raffel's astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc) as as sharp and bright as stars."
* Time Out New York: "Raffel’s work sits comfortably with that of authors like Amy Hempel and Diane Williams: "Her prose is intense enough to make even everyday topics seem fire-hot."
* O, The Oprah Magazine: "Sharp, spare stories about women at, or approaching, the end of their ropes."
* Publisher's Weekly: "Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace."
* Booklist: "These reflective, well-tempered fictions are bursting with energy, requiring readers to look more closely at the world around them."
* More: "Highly imaginative stories filled with sly wit..."
To those weighty endorsements, add mine.
(Book Review originally published at www.isak.typepad.com
Raffel focuses especially on speech; there are a lot of verbal exchanges here that are often manifested in one-word banter. In her conversation with Kimball, Raffel said that this minimalist approach to dialogue is intended to convey how most of us only hear a word or two of what others say. What is on the page, then, is what sticks for these characters. For readers navigating the exchanges, we experience both a rawness and mutedness to this filtered kind of conversation: what is heard and, sometimes, meant, is set in high relief, while the lack of contextual words and verbal filler that we are accustomed to in speech gives these exchanges a dream-like, underwater feel.
At the same time, even outside of the speech in Raffel's stories, her writing is patently sonic; it is evident that she hears every syllable of her stories. To read them is to defamiliarize these syllables, to meet them again, anew.
"Visible light covers only about one octave, speaking in musical terms." That's the epigraph for Further Adventures, a translated quote from Max Born's The Restless Universe--which Raffel's father used to read to her when she was young, and of which she understood nearly nothing. Like Born, Raffel's book is interested in alternative octaves; as a reader, the temptation to stick with what is visible, what we are familiar with in traditional storytelling, exacerbates the awe we feel when confronted with ... let us call it the invisible light. What we see there, what rhymes and dissents from what we know in the visible light, feels essential.
This is a collection that operates on its own pitch, its own time, its own light. It is "minimal" storytelling only in it that is says nothing extra; little galaxies are contained in these spare stories.
For an unconventional collection of short stories published by an indie press, it is both surprising and pleasing to see it reviewed in high-profile places; no doubt that this is in part due to Raffel's career as a magazine editor in New York. Among the responses:
* Vanity Fair: "The stories in Dawn Raffel's astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc) as as sharp and bright as stars."
* Time Out New York: "Raffel’s work sits comfortably with that of authors like Amy Hempel and Diane Williams: "Her prose is intense enough to make even everyday topics seem fire-hot."
* O, The Oprah Magazine: "Sharp, spare stories about women at, or approaching, the end of their ropes."
* Publisher's Weekly: "Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace."
* Booklist: "These reflective, well-tempered fictions are bursting with energy, requiring readers to look more closely at the world around them."
* More: "Highly imaginative stories filled with sly wit..."
To those weighty endorsements, add mine.
(Book Review originally published at www.isak.typepad.com
May 29, 2017
Ultra-condensed narratives winding around and through a family or thematically-related series of family relationships. Actually, 'narrative' is misleading here. Despite frequent dialogues, many of the traditional markings of narrative fiction -- characters, events -- are largely supplanted by words themselves and a kind of tone-poem seepage of meaning from somewhere between them. Unsurprisingly, Raffel thanks Diane Williams (whose Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty I've been reading simultaneously) but Raffel deploys her words with a little more space for development, even allowing marked variations in her mid-length pieces, diverging into a fairy tales and lists. Still, none of these reaches more than a handful of pages, despite the sense of scope throughout.
I feel like I'm going through the motions with this review a bit -- it's the problem I have digesting poetry and flash fiction in general -- somehow I have difficulty holding onto them, and thus less to say than I would like. Especially when, as a reading experience, I liked this quite a bit.
I feel like I'm going through the motions with this review a bit -- it's the problem I have digesting poetry and flash fiction in general -- somehow I have difficulty holding onto them, and thus less to say than I would like. Especially when, as a reading experience, I liked this quite a bit.
September 4, 2012
I love compression. There are feelings and truths that can be captured only by using fewer words. So Dawn Raffel is my kind of read. There are 21 stories in this slim collection (which has a cool black cover), some only a couple of pages long. The protagonist is often a woman with a long train of memories, a mother, a grown daughter, someone who has emerged from a history of grandparents and great-aunts and lost European and Midwestern worlds and lives. People interrupt each other, don't listen--or sometimes hear more deeply than with mere sense organs. There are very short passages I love:
"I was learning to use the computer at home. I was processing words. I kept violating something."
and, during a driving lesson:
"You can pass," my father says, "but you have to be quick. Caution causes accidents."
and longer ones:
"We cannot find the car in the lot, again. Our ears burn, or mine do. Wind off the lake holds a violence in winter. My father says nothing. The building from which we have just made an exit is already locked; its churning stars extinguished, planets suspended, moons switched off. It is a very old facility. It rests on a spit, a peninsula, a man-made extension, apart form the city, the center of the city with its steam and vibration. The lot is near empty, the sky too low. "Now I remember," my father says. "We're not here."
"I was learning to use the computer at home. I was processing words. I kept violating something."
and, during a driving lesson:
"You can pass," my father says, "but you have to be quick. Caution causes accidents."
and longer ones:
"We cannot find the car in the lot, again. Our ears burn, or mine do. Wind off the lake holds a violence in winter. My father says nothing. The building from which we have just made an exit is already locked; its churning stars extinguished, planets suspended, moons switched off. It is a very old facility. It rests on a spit, a peninsula, a man-made extension, apart form the city, the center of the city with its steam and vibration. The lot is near empty, the sky too low. "Now I remember," my father says. "We're not here."
May 16, 2020
I really enjoyed the dream-like quality of these short stories. More poetry than prose, in my opinion. If you don't like stories that feel more like "prismatic drops of rain" as Susan Straight called them, then I wouldn't pick this one up, but if you're a fan of say, Maggie Nelson's Bluets, then this might be just right for you.
July 19, 2010
This book should come with a warning: Don't read when tired. You have to be completely alert to follow Raffel's original, choppy prose style. I found myself rereading passages many times, as I was reading before bed and often exhausted. However, it was worth it. Don't know too many women writing like this. If you are a Diane Williams fan, you must read this book. I found Raffel's style particularly effective when writing scenes between family members. Those unspoken words in the gaps of her prose are heavily laden with more meaning than when she is writing about other characters. "No Place on Earth," which takes place on a bus and is a delightful, poignant exchange between a boy and his young mother is a 5 star story for me, and well worth the price of this beautifully designed little book. Dzanc is publishing some wonderful stuff.
April 28, 2013
Got this book from the library's blind date pile and I was excited. I read the cover blurb and thought it would be based on science.
Instead of that, I got prose that read like modern poetry. Then I decided I was reading the ramblings of an elderly person at the end of their life - snippets that made little sense. I moved from that to deciding I was reading the ramblings of madwoman.
I've reread the blurbs on the back cover. I've read some of the online reviews. I was irritated because I felt sort of stupid because I didn't share the opinion that it's brilliant writing. Then I got irritated because I felt irritated. Finally I read one review that said "At least it was short." Yes! Exactly.
(And not only that, but the cover of the book feels weird.)
Instead of that, I got prose that read like modern poetry. Then I decided I was reading the ramblings of an elderly person at the end of their life - snippets that made little sense. I moved from that to deciding I was reading the ramblings of madwoman.
I've reread the blurbs on the back cover. I've read some of the online reviews. I was irritated because I felt sort of stupid because I didn't share the opinion that it's brilliant writing. Then I got irritated because I felt irritated. Finally I read one review that said "At least it was short." Yes! Exactly.
(And not only that, but the cover of the book feels weird.)
February 10, 2011
I read the first two stories: "Near Taurus" and "Her Purchase." Wasn't grabbed by either story, and after skimming a few more, don't think that will change. The prose is choppy, and it feels like Raffel is going for style over substance. Also, 21 stories regarding frenetic mothers and their neglected children seems like overkill to me.
April 12, 2012
Raffel takes the focus of poetry and slurs the brief narrative pops in her collection to create a portable constellation. The sharpness of the language, the precision of the syntax- reading feels like walking in the ocean at night and discovering words with your toes- as the collection progresses the toes become more adept. I haven't read a collection as spare and evocative.
June 1, 2010
At least it was short........
January 13, 2018
This book of short stories is gorgeous. You almost have to let go of trying to understanding it to really enjoy it. It's full of broken dialogue, half finished sentences, forgotten thoughts, strange words and abrupt endings. The stories are heartbreaking and sweet and heavy. They deal with mother's and fathers and babies and mortality and morbidity and truth and sadness. I cried reading 6/21 of the stories. Raffel's prose is like no others it punches you in the gut but also comforts you. Read this collection if you want to be destroyed.
February 15, 2018
These "stories" are a kind of hybrid between short stories and poems. Unfortunately, for me, they didn't work as either.
February 28, 2011
This is a book that would really benefit from multiple readings. The prose is spare and poetic, and it seemed many of the stories melded together, sharing characters and themes that I only got a hint of on the first read. The movement in the stories is subtle, but elegant. I wanted and needed more, which could either be a good thing, or the indication of too many missing parts. I don't like the feeling that I have to fill in all the blanks, but for some stories, the empty parts should remain that way.
September 10, 2014
I see creative writing and my own voice as a writer differently after reading this. The style was refreshing, although admittedly at times disconcerting and confusing. I realized that is a good thing, though. In the end, the book left me inspired and desiring to read more of Raffel.
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November 21, 2009Emprise Review Review Editor reviews Further Adventures in The Restless Universe, read it here. http://emprisereview.com/?page_id=2666
June 10, 2010
This new collection from Dawn Raffel shows her at the top of her game:
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December 21, 2012Check out a free preview of a story from Further Adventures in the Restless Universe in our Bookslinger app!
January 8, 2013
This book was an interesting collection of short stories.weird, but good. Definitely not an easy read, although it is a quick read.
August 7, 2015
What just happened? Wow.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews