Archivists
About This Book
Daphne Kalotay's Archivists is a collection of short stories about ordinary people whose lives are thrown off course by a private loss or a larger historical upheaval. Again and again, her characters stumble toward connection and a kind of release, often in directions no one would predict. The book was longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and it earlier won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction in 2021. The stories mix moments of transcendence with dry wit and a light touch of the uncanny as they take on life's absurdities and disasters. Their backdrops include the 2008 financial crash, the political fallout after the 2016 American presidential election, gentrification, lockdown during the pandemic, serious illness, and the lasting effects of the Holocaust and of Communist rule in Eastern Europe on later generations. Among the characters are a no-nonsense realist who must face her own mortality, along with an aspiring sorcerer; a thirteen-year-old girl in 1950s Toronto who works her way into the ranks of Bell Canada; a ninety-nine-year-old woman who seems impossible to defeat; and a hiking group in Germany set against a lone woman who is followed on a walk in New Mexico. Across these tales, Kalotay explores identity, history, and memory, and the shared human search for meaning in a world that feels slightly off balance.
ISBN: 9780810146082
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