Elisabeth Sheffield

The newest novel by Elisabeth Sheffield, the award-winning author of Gone and Fort Da What does it mean to really live? Or not? Set in eastern, upstate New York, Helen Keller Really Lived features a fortyish former barfly and grifter who must make a living in the wake of her wealthy husband’s death, and who finds work in a clinic helping women seeking reproductive assistance. The other main character is the grifter’s dead ex-husband, a Ukrainian hooker-to-healer success story, who prior to his demise was a gynecologist and after, an amateur folklorist, or ghostlorist, who collected and provided scholarly commentary on the stories of his fellow “revenants.” Their intertwined stories explore the mistakes, miscarriages, inadequacies, and defeats that may have led to their divorce, including his failure (according to her) to “fully live.” As it investigates the theme of what it means to “really live” or not, Elisabeth Sheffield’s brilliant new novel is also an exploration of virtual reality in the sense of the experience provided by literature. It is a novel awash in a multitude of voices, from the obscenity-laced, Nabokovian soliloquys of the dead Ukrainian doctor, to the trade-school / midcentury-romance-novel-constrained style of his dead mother-in-law.

A Novel

Helen Keller Really Lived

Fort Da is a psychological and linguistic exploration of obsession and illicit love.

A Report

Fort Da

While Sheffield's study shares a common presupposition of these recent interpretations, it challenges the idea that the move Joyce makes with this alignment is one that puts him on the side of woman. Sheffield contends that Joyce is not expressing his solidarity with woman or "womanly thought" in opposition to a masculine literary and philosophical tradition, but rather relying on ancient stereotypes to personify a dangerously "other" form of writing.

Joyce's Abandoned Female Costumes, Gratefully Received

Cris Mazza

Jeffrey DeShell

The follow-up volume to Mazza and DeShell's hugely popular Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics features new work by Rikki Ducornet, Eurydice, Elizabeth Graver, Ursule Molinaro, and fourteen other witty and deadly serious writers. Chick-Lit 2 discovers new and alternative voices in women's fiction whose stories do not involve trauma that comes from the outside. As Mazza writes in her introduction, "Sexual assaults and harassments and injurious poor body images do exist and have waged a war on women (the American Medical Association says so). But for this book, I was interested in seeing what action(s) women characters can incite on their own, whether bad or good, hopeful or dead-end, progressive or destructive."

Elisabeth Sheffield

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