The Archivists

The Archivists

By Daphne Kalotay

Winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize,

judged by Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Makkai

The characters in The Archivists are everyday people, but when private losses or the shocks of history set their worlds reeling, they find connection and liberation in surprising, buoyant ways. Winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, this vibrant collection brings transcendence, wry humour, and a touch of the uncanny to lifes absurdities and catastropheswhether the 2008 economic crash, fallout after the 2016 presidential election, gentrification, pandemic lockdown, illness, or the intergenerational impacts of the Holocaust and Communist occupation of Eastern Europe.

A hardheaded realist is confronted by both her mortality and a would-be wizard. A thirteen-year-old girl in 1950s Toronto infiltrates the ranks of Bell Canada. A ninety-nine-year-old woman appears to be invincible. A group hikes in Germany, while a solitary woman is pursued on a walk in New Mexico. These deeply moving stories ingeniously consider issues of identity, history, and memory and our shared search for meaning in an off-kilter world.

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Praise

'Kalotay is one of our great writers, and these storiesintimately detailed with grief, hope, longing, joyare small miracles. More than once I was brought to tears. Reading them is like magically entering a set of photographs, and feeling as the characters feel. Or noof mirrors, because we recognize ourselves' -Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less

 'Vivid and visceral details, complex characterization, excellent tension, and suspenseful arcs. These wide-ranging literary stories will have widespread appeal.' -Dexter Palmer, author of Mary Toft

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Daphne Kalotay grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Vassar College before moving to Massachusetts to attend Boston Universitys Creative Writing Program. There, her stories went on to win the schools Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize and a Transatlantic Review Award from The Henfield Foundation. She remained at BU to complete a PhD in Modern & Contemporary Literature and, with Saul Bellow as her advisor, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the works of Mavis Gallant. Her fiction collection, Calamity and Other Stories, was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize, and her debut novel, the national and international bestseller Russian Winter, won the 2011 Writers League of Texas Fiction Prize, made the long list for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and has been published in over twenty foreign editions. Daphnes second novel, Sight Reading, was a Boston Globe bestseller, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize and winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award in Fiction. Relativity, from her collection-in-progress, was the 2017 One City One Story Boston selection. Her newest novel, Blue Hours, is a 2020 Massachusetts Book Awards Must Read. Her forthcoming fiction collection, The Archivists, won the 2021 Grace Paley Prize and will be published in 2023.