Enchantment: New and Selected Stories [Paperback]

The short fiction of Thaisa Frank has captivated readers for two decades, and now many of those pieces are collected in one volume, along with several new stories. In the title story, a lonely mother and housewife orders an enchanted man from a website called The Wondrous Traveler, who arrives with instructions for use and a list of frequently asked questions about enchantment. In Thread, two circus performers who pass through the eye of a needle become undone by a complicated love triangle. In Henna, a young writing teacher must contend with an exotic student who will not write, her hands covered in dye and her fingers sprouting innumerable gardens. And in The Loneliness of the Midwestern Vampire, the undead descend upon the heartland of the country and become accustomed to its friendlier way of life, attending barn raisings and feasting on cattle in an attempt to normalize their darker passions.



These are vibrant, compelling stories that examine the distance between imagination and reality, and how characters bridge that gap in their attempt to reach one another.Praise for Enchantment

…It is difficult to think of a better title for Thaisa Frank's captivating collection of new and selected stories than Enchantment...[it] has a marvelous, dreamlike quality – the sort of book that is not so much read as it is experienced, a spellbinding blend of flash fiction, short stories, and novellas that also move seamlessly and pleasingly from the concrete and the surreal, the historical and the fantastic…Like many great story collections, Enchantment is a book that teaches the reader how to read it as they move through its pages, and…it soon becomes apparent that Frank is writing what she knows about – that in her varied, imaginative and often metaphorical means of capturing emotional truth, she has created alƒQ