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Paperform + Email Integrations

In a matter of minutes and without a single line of code, Zapier allows you to connect Paperform and Email by Zapier, with as many as 1 possible integrations. Are you ready to find your productivity superpowers?

It's easy to connect Paperform + Email by Zapier and requires absolutely zero coding experience—the only limit is your own imagination.

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New Form Submission

Triggers when a form is submitted.

Send Outbound Email

Send an email from your own custom address. Up to 10 emails sent per hour.

New Inbound Email

Triggers when an email is forwarded to your own custom address.

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Paperform helps you create beautiful forms online.

About Email by Zapier

Send and receive email via a custom Zapier email address at "". This is great for triggering off of emails and sending custom emails. (Max of 10 email sends per hour.) Have direct access to your own email servers? Check out our IMAP and SMTP services!

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Unboxing DirecTV Now Android TV Streamer

Beta testers, such as a well-connected associate, have begun receiving AT&T’s DirecTV Now Android TV streaming box. Both the packaging and startup sequence prominently display that “beta” designation – and with good reason. While DirecTV Now fires up fast, a subset of cloud DVR programming is conspicuously unavailable. As full-on Android TV, the Google Assistant … Read more

DirecTV Unveils Video Streaming Android Box

An industry peer passed along a fascinating invite soliciting existing DirecTV Now customers to test a new AT&T Android streaming set-top first uncovered by Variety. As to why this box needs to exist, I can’t quite say… given the great options AT&T and DirecTV already leverage, like the similarly Android-powered Amazon Fire TV. But AT&T/DirecTV … Read more

New TiVo Experience Hits Mobile Apps

TiVo is out with a massive refresh of its Android and Apple iOS apps this week. Most notable is the extension of the TiVo Experience 4 (aka Hydra and Mira) to mobile. And. I gotta say, I actually prefer Hydra here (vs TV lean back) – it provides a snappy and sleek modern look that works well in this content. TiVo also indicates we should expect a variety of streaming performance improvements with more granular config options. Bonus: iPhone X support.

However, as with all initial TiVo releases, to get the software out the door in a timely fashion (one presumes), a number of features have been excised: Downloaded shows are no longer grouped within folders (see bottom left pic) and you can no longer swipe to delete. Also possibly in the negative column, remote control visuals have been updated… dropping the iconic peanut presentation, with mixed results. Still no iPhone cellular streaming, although I’m told it’s on the roadmap.

Read moreNew TiVo Experience Hits Mobile Apps

AirTV To Repurpose Legacy Slingbox Hardware

By way of AFTVNews, we learn that DISH went back to the well.

AirTV was originally conceptualized as a network tuner designed to stream local OTA into SlingTV apps, on various platforms, alongside the premium content. However, what they ended up launching was a Playskool-looking Android TV box, with optional tuner, for local antenna TV playback only. But, for 2018, it looks like DISH’s AirTV LLC subsidiary has two new boxes on the docket.

Read moreAirTV To Repurpose Legacy Slingbox Hardware

Channel Master Preps OTA Android TV Streamer

By way of Twitter, we gather Channel Master has licensed the Technicolor Skipper and is poised to introduce it as the Stream+ at CES in January. The Skipper is a 4K Android TV set-top box, with voice control remote, and over-the-air capabilities… which will hopefully see greater uptake as the Stream+ versus the competing and largely forgotten DISH AirTV, also produced by Technicolor. Stream+ joins CM’s OTA DVR+ in their post-antenna lineup. And given that DVR button on the Stream+ remote, perhaps we’ll be fortunate enough to see some interplay between the devices or even local recording capabilities via USB drive – in addition to requisite cord cutting streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu. Stay tuned!

Skipper details:

  • Out of the box industrial design
  • Android TV certified
  • OTT and Live TV services with optional Broadcast TV services
  • 4K Ultra HD: HEVC/VP9 Ultra HD 2160p/60 video
  • Wireless Connectivity: Dual band IEEE 802.11n 2.4 GHz (2×2) and IEEE 802.11ac 5 GHz (2×2) interfaces
  • Media sharing functions using a USB 3.0 port for plugging of HDD
  • Enhanced user experience with 3D graphics
  • Future-proof quad core CPU ready for gaming services
  • Bluetooth Low Energy remote with voice control

Read moreChannel Master Preps OTA Android TV Streamer

Digital Media Bytes

A periodic roundup of relevant news… Comcast Appears to Soft Launch First 4K DVR Dish Network is quietly putting Android TV in hotel rooms DISH Hopper integrates with Amazon Alexa for hands-free TV Amazon Video can now stream in 4K on Xbox One S Android TV to gain new home launcher and Google Assistant with … Read more

TiVo Mavrik is an OTA Cloud DVR!

Along with the TiVo Mavrik leaks comes word that a new Android app is also en route… and, with it, the refreshed interface and confirmation of cloud storage for your local antenna television recordings! From the Amazon app description: This is a TiVo App that works as user interface for OTA Streaming, Diskless Cloud DVR TiVo Device … Read more

Android TV is Fantastic. Well Mostly

Fellow tech enthusiast and DC neighbor Joel Ward jumps back into his role as a Features contributor here at Zatz Not Funny. Beyond ZNF, Joel can be found at Joelsef Explains It All and @joelsef on Twitter.

I recently picked up a new Sony TV with Android TV for our living room. This television replaced a Sony LCD HDTV from the late 2000s. That set hails from an era when the majority of TVs were dumb — no built-in apps that today’s smart TVs feature. But I increased its intelligence by first adding a Windows Media Center PC back in 2009, then experimenting with Google TV, Boxee, Chromecast, and ultimately settling on Roku 3 as our over-the-top streamer.

We arrive in 2016 and it’s nearly impossible to find a decent television over 30″ without some sort of “smart” designation and apps aplenty. That’s why I decided to go with a Sony this time around. The last time we refreshed a TV (for a different room, back in 2013) we went with a Samsung and its Samsung Smart Hub. In the three years we’ve had that TV, Samsung has pared down the 2013 TV’s UI to the very basics and removed many of the original features. It still has apps, including Netflix and HBO, but it’s nothing like what Roku offers.

Our new Sony X800D series runs Android TV and Sony has Android TV across most of its television line now. Besides the Nvidia Shield and now defunct Google Nexus Player, Sony is the biggest player in Android TV at the moment, although Sharp and Philips have options as well.

Read moreAndroid TV is Fantastic. Well Mostly

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About the Yoga Schedule Editor

Zolé offers a yoga schedule editor for web hosting clients. The editor is $15 a month in addition to web hosting fees of $18 a month. In other words $33 covers the cost of the editor and your web hosting. The schedule can be customized to meet your needs. For example if you have two studio locations, a column can be set up to show “studio”. Or if you take payments using Paypal, a column can be set up where a Paypal button will automatically be created from the date you enter in the editor. This schedule is responsive, meaning it will respond to the size of the viewer’s device, and present a layout best suited for that device. That does require that your website pages are also responsive.

Entering a New Class Using the Schedule Editor:

Selecting an Existing Class to Edit or Delete:

Editing an Existing Class:

Sample of Yoga Schedule in a Website:

Live version of the schedule can be seen on the Two Dog Yoga website or the Phinney Ridge Yoga schedule page.


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Idra Novey's characters are hilariously impulsive, terribly misguided, hopelessly lost, relentlessly determined, and immediately sympathetic. An incisive meditation on the relationship between literature and life

Idra Novey, Ways to Disappear, Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

A debut novel about the disappearance of a famous Brazilian novelist and the young translator who turns her life upside down to follow her author's trail.
Deep in gambling debt, the celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda is last seen holding a suitcase and a cigar and climbing into an almond tree. She abruptly vanishes.
In snowy Pittsburgh, her American translator Emma hears the news and, against the wishes of her boyfriend and Beatriz's two grown children, flies immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and her author's children conspire to solve the mystery of Yagoda's curious disappearance and staunch the colorful demands of her various outstanding affairs: the rapacious loan shark with a zeal for severing body parts, and the washed-up and disillusioned editor who launched Yagoda's career years earlier.

"Ways to Disappear is unlike any novel you've ever read. It's a lush page-turner, a journey into the unique madness of modern Brazil, and a joyful ride into the crazed passion of literary creation itself. Idra Novey is a wonder of a writer. She's supremely erudite and funny, and in this amazing first novel she takes on subjects as diverse as sex, publishing and butterflies with equal brio and wit." ―Hector Tobar

"I fell immediately under the spell of this short, strange, glorious novel. When Beatriz Yagoda, famous writer, international treasure, and mother of two, disappears into a tree in Copacabana and takes an arboreal leave of absence from the world, her worried translator, Emma, takes it upon herself to track Beatriz down. In addition to being a sui generis detective story, Emma's quest to find her author is also a metaphysical journey along the fluid coastlines of life and art. Novey gives us a kaleidoscopic vision of a full universe and of her character's devious hearts."―Karen Russell

"If this novel were two hundred times longer, I'd happily read nothing else for the next year. But in this reading, I so dreaded the end I doled out its last pages nearly one sentence at a time for days... With all its shimmering brilliance and insight, vividly drawn, beguiling characters, a knowing, unexoticized Brazil, and unabashed storytelling, Ways to Disappear is the most sublime novel I've read in a long time."―Francisco Goldman

"Lit by luminous moments and humming with snatches of fever dream, Idra Novey's Ways to Disappear offers an acute and surprising exploration of the ways in which we do appear to one another: the strange tributaries that lead us toward intimacy alongside the sacrifices that this intimacy compels. It's a novel that questions what will constitute us: Is it what we do or what we imagine doing? The things we have or the things we long for? In its treatment of translation as a necessary deformation and an act of unexpected love, it translates these abstract questions into a narrative at once playful and chilling. It's impossible to put this book down, or to shake its residue once you've finished it."―Leslie Jamison

"With tremendous intelligence and wit, Ways to Disappear up-ends all the misleading memes about magical realism and in the process makes its own very real and unprecedented magic; this is a fantastic book."―Rivka Galchen

"It's not often you encounter a novel that's unlike anything you've read, but Idra Novey's spare, funny, and moving Ways to Disappear is just that. I loved this novel and would have gulped it down in a single afternoon if I hadn't also wanted to stop and savor each sentence. Equal parts detective story, madcap comedy, and exploration of art and identity, it drew me in, charmed me, made me laugh and made me think. While under its spell, I just kept wondering how something so elegant and blazingly smart could be so much fun."―Ted Thompson

"Ways to Disappear centers on the complicated and mysterious relationship between author and text and reader and writer. Idra Novey has given us a first rate novel of ideas, a book that is also funny, poignant, and profound."―Darcey Steinke

"A fast-paced, supremely engaging story of characters with good intentions who quickly get in over their heads . . . Novey's characters are hilariously impulsive, terribly misguided, hopelessly lost, relentlessly determined, and immediately sympathetic. An incisive meditation on the relationship between literature and life, a reflection on the cumulative result of everyday decisions, and a dazzling, truly memorable work of humor and heart."―Booklist

A famous novelist’s disappearance upends the life of her American translator.
Novey's surreal debut begins as a mystery: legendary Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda has inexplicably climbed into an almond tree with a cigar and a suitcase and has not been seen since. Upon receiving the news—is she aware, an unfamiliar emailer wants to know, that her author has been missing for five days?—translator Emma Neufeld puts her life in Pittsburgh on hold and hops a flight to Rio de Janeiro to join the search, much to the chagrin of her sweetly dull boyfriend. On the ground in Rio, the situation quickly begins to clarify: Beatriz Yagoda is not only a serious literary novelist, but also a serious online poker player who now owes an angry loan shark half a million dollars, or else. And so, together with Yagoda’s adult children, Raquel (practical) and Marcus (overwhelmingly handsome), Emma embarks on a madcap chase to track down the missing author while fending off the increasingly impatient shark. Meanwhile, Yagoda’s publisher, Roberto Rocha, burned out by a sea of lesser manuscripts and desperate for another one of hers, finds himself equally entangled: he doesn’t know any more about her whereabouts than Emma and the rest, but he’s been the one responding to her secret requests for cash, and—more importantly—he’s the one with the means to pay off her debts. Stylish, absurd, sometimes romantic, and often very funny, the novel is as much about the writing process as it is about the high-stakes plot. And if it doesn’t always add up to more than the sum of its parts—like a dream, the book is almost overwhelmingly vivid when you’re in it, and the details dissipate quickly when you’re not—taken piece by piece, it’s a tour de force.
Delightful and original. ―Kirkus

Poet and translator Novey’s briskly paced first novel is a clever literary mystery and a playful portrait of the artist as a young translator. Novey depicts her heroine, Emma, becoming embroiled in the life of an enigmatic Brazilian author, Beatriz Yagoda, whose books she has translated for years. When Beatriz, last seen puffing on a cigar and perched on a tree branch with a suitcase, goes missing, Emma leaves Pittsburgh, Pa., and her stick-in-the-mud fiancé behind to fly to Rio and find Beatriz, the author of works “so strange and spare that it felt like a whispered, secret history of the world.” Emma is convinced that these works, along with a cryptic, unfinished manuscript left behind, could elucidate the mystery of Beatriz’s whereabouts. The search is conducted alongside Beatriz’s two adult children, one who resents the “gangly tourist” and the other who seduces her, and it has its share of violence and romance—it reads like an Ali Smith novel with a fun Brazilian noir vibe. But underlying these comic noir elements is an eloquent meditation on the art and anxiety of translation, as well as a story about literature as a means of revelation and concealment: who ultimately knows more about the secretive missing woman, the translator intimately familiar with her writing or the children who have never finished any of her books? Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. - Publishers Weekly

Ways to Disappear is a beckoning mix of comedy and noir, romance and violence. Perhaps above all else, it is a love letter to the art of translation. That most particular, intimate act is threaded throughout, and the question arises again and again: how do you know a person? Through words, or through blood? And aren’t relationships between people translations themselves, in a sense? The epigraph to the novel is a quote from Edmond Jabès, “For a time we became the same word. It could not last.” That singular moment.
Idra Novey has translated, among other authors, Clarice Lispector, widely considered to be Brazil’s greatest modern writer and the recipient of much attention over the last few years, with new translations of her work published by New Directions and the 2009 critically acclaimed biography by Ben Moser, Why this World. When asked about the relationship of Lispector to the missing author at the heart of her debut novel, Novey said Beatriz Yagoda “is definitely not Clarice Lispector but was inspired by my relationship in my head with this author I had made for myself,” the version of Lispector Novey has imagined communicating with, in the absence of the author’s live presence.
Beatriz Yagoda is a preeminent Brazilion novelist who climbs up a tree in Rio, suitcase in hand, cigar in mouth, and disappears. Her American translator, Emma, hears the news in snowy Pittsburgh, where she is very much not interested in planning a marriage to her fiancé Miles, and jumps on a plane. She doesn’t question that the news arrives in an email from a man she has never heard mention of before, Flamenguinho. Miles protests her decision, citing practicalities like needing to save money for the wedding. But Emma “knew Beatriz too intimately not to go and help now. What if no one else thought of the scene in one of Beatriz’s earliest stories with the warden who disappears into a tree?”
The humor is sharp and tender in this line, and throughout the entire book. The form of the novel is itself playful and clever. Brief chapters spliced with emails, and definitions of words according to Emma’s use of them (“Permission” is partly defined as: “Formal consent, as in: A translator must acquire permission to publish a story consisting of words that are not her own but that also incidentally are.”) There is the occasional wink to Lispector, but it’s just that. Novey’s debut has a warmth and humor all her own.
Emma is often slightly ridiculous and seemingly clueless, but Novey doesn’t hang her out to dry. In a recent interview with Francisco Goldman, Novey says her intention was “to write a particular kind of North American naiveté with a sense of humor, and without condemning it. To just understand it for what it is.” Emma’s wits are about her and she needs them, for from the first it’s clear that neither this trip to Rio nor the search for her author are at all what she had in mind. Flamenguinho is a loan shark, after $600,000 he claims Beatriz owes him in gambling debt. As he threatens Emma with violence if she doesn’t come up with the money from the sales of Beatriz’s work, she doesn’t feel it’s “the time to explain that Elsewhere Press was just a woman named Judie in upstate New York and various interns from a small university nearby.” And that Emma and Beatriz each only make $500 per work. Not quite ransom money.
Of the various scenarios in which she’d imagined herself in Rio, receiving a threat of this nature was not one of them. She’d also never imagined her author as someone who would conceal an addiction, and certainly not to gambling. She’d translated every emotion Beatriz had ever written. They’d discussed hundreds of words and why Beatriz had chosen them over others . . . If she couldn’t find Beatriz, she couldn’t find anyone.
Only much later in the novel does Emma question her knowledge of Beatriz: “In the nearly ten years that Emma had spent translating Beatriz, it had never occurred to her to consider whether her author’s body possessed as many complicated secrets as her fiction did. But why wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it have to?”
The action of the novel is presented in a fluid series of moments; things proceed at a brisk pace, but we still soak in the languor of the heat, of the unraveling of stories, of intimacies. That languorous heat is its own character, its presence pronounced from Emma’s first steps off the plane. She can already “feel her dress adhering to her arms and lower back. After so much winter, the sticky sensation, the rising odors were glorious. To arrive in Rio was to remember that one had a body and brought it everywhere.”
After her meeting with Flamenguinho, Emma proceeds to Beatriz’s apartment to see her children, steely Raquel and beautiful Marcus. The former is skeptical of this gambling story, but a search on their mother’s computer reveals that the torrid tale is true, and far worse than they could have anticipated.
Raquel scoffs at Emma’s belief that she can help because she knows Beatriz’s words, and has her own take:
When people asked what it was like to be the daughter of someone who came up with such peculiar stories, Raquel told them the truth. She’d never read her mother’s books. She had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you know her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down—wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?
Emma may have translated every emotion her author had ever written, but Raquel has had to find a means of understanding her mother’s silences and indirect communications her whole life. Marcus himself, we learn later, has never really read her work either. “I’ve never finished any one of my mother’s books…I knew her books were all in the apartment, but so was she. It never felt right to read her when I could hear her in the next room. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to know what she said in them. He shrugged. Or it was just laziness.”
Yet Raquel shows the particularly intimate way she knows and, even if she doesn’t see it as such, understands her mother:
Every six or seven years her mother produced a book. Of all the unreliable things about her mother, this pattern had remained unchanged. It was as true to her mother’s mysterious nature as it was of a palm to produce coconuts.
Even if she never read them, Raquel had appreciated her mother’s books for the sureness of their arrival, for proving that her mother was a functioning person, and despite the reputed darkness people found so alarming in her work, in person her mother was reassuring.

While Emma thinks she has a clue as to where Beatriz is hiding from one of her stories and heads to a nearby island with Marcus in tow, Raquel remains home, positive her mother wouldn’t be anywhere near Rio. “If her mother was hiding on an island, Raquel was certain it would be one much farther away. Ilha Grande was too close to Rio and full of bourgeois bohemians. Her mother wouldn’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of bobos in flip-flops smoking pot while they texted on their iPhones.” (Would anyone?)
Raquel’s hunch is confirmed by a letter Beatriz sends to a man named Roberto Rocha, her first publisher and forever dedicated editor. He comes from a wealthy family, and it is to him that Beatriz writes, under the names of her characters, asking him for money to pay for her hotel in Bahia.
The action unfolds seamlessly in a series of episodes that jump between the principal characters, though we don’t enter Beatriz’s own mind until almost the end; we only see her through others’ impressions and snippets of her writing. Novey not only thus builds her portraits, but gets at an element of relationships and time, ways of knowing a person, a writer, through her own language and that of others’. Meanwhile, Emma and Marcus turn up no clues on the island, but the heat and the attractiveness of Marcus overwhelm Emma’s fidelity to her fiancé. They begin an affair, making fodder for the Brazilian tabloids that are closely covering the disappearance of their beloved author, whom they refer to as South African even though, as Raquel remarks to herself, Beatriz came to Brazil when she was two. (Alluding to biographers’ noting that Lispector, no matter that she considered herself fully Brazilian, migrated from Ukraine, though for years there was a haziness as to exactly how old she was at the time.) Raquel isn’t surprised about the development between Marcus and Emma, just further annoyed by her presence. The antagonism continues, even as they are forced to work together not only on Beatriz’s trail, but also to rescue Marcus when he is kidnapped by Flamenguinho and held for ransom.
All is far from lost, as Emma proves her steadfastness, while Raquel is devastated and for the first time seems to lose some control. And yet Raquel also found the key to her brother’s rescue: while digging thought Beatriz’s computer, she discovered the final manuscript her mother was working on, which is not only the first thing she’s read by her mother, but it also seems to hold an answer to a lingering question about who her father really is. However, while Raquel discovers the manuscript, it is Emma who has the bold savvy to bargain with Rocha for the ransom money in exchange for it. She knows its worth and understands his desire for Beatriz’s words, because she shares it.
Rocha is also Novey’s means of getting at another side of publishing – the struggle of a small independent publishing house in an age of corporatized publishers, as well as the struggle of the true (and perhaps idealized) editor who has, in a sense, lived and toiled for his one great author. Rocha is a wealthy snob, but he is an editor through and through. The women ask for a lot of money to pay for Marcus’s freedom, and while Rocha imagines the complaints of his lover, he thinks to himself, “but what was money for if not to halt the mutilation of some boy’s face and his possible death? What was the point of being an editor if he didn’t have a manuscript like this one in front of him, if his days contained nothing but enervating sentences that risked nothing, asked nothing, did nothing but require ink in a book that generated no real emotion, no genuine unease, not even from the editor who published it?” (A passage that will likely resonate with many members of a certain branch of publishing.)
As we follow the characters through mounting threats, ever-higher stakes, the realization of threatened violence and the mystery of Beatriz, each of them has his and her role in the fate of the novel – ultimately in the way each person knows Beatriz is how they find her, but also how they find themselves, and each other.
There’s a joy in discovering a richness to what at first seems perhaps to be just a lighthearted caper. Embroidered into the theme of translation and the plot itself are questions of the role of the translator—Emma constantly is both at the center of the action and yet understands when she must be silently present, yet never disappear. During the scene where she and Raquel bargain with Rocha for the ransom money, her role as intermediary plays out: “With both chairs occupied, Emma was left hovering slightly to the side of the conversation. It was not an unfamiliar position or one without benefits. Present but unacknowledged, she was under no pressure to speak. This didn’t mean she couldn’t, however. Or that, timed right, her influence couldn’t prove significant, even pivotal.”
There is also a twist to her usual role, for as all of this is unfolding, in moments of great panic and anxiety, without a book to read, Emma begins to write her own story, of a translator on trial, who can only be saved by a defense mounted by the author herself. Emma’s writing isn’t just a meditation on her role as translator, but also serves to “steady herself with a little fantasy, to disappear for just a moment into the relief of make-believe – into the plea hidden in every fiction for immortality.” Until now Portuguese was her escape from her life in Pittsburgh with Miles; in Brazil, her escape is her own words.
For all this celebration and investigation of language, however, Novey also shows there are moments where language breaks down, when words cannot be found, and blood cannot fill the gap. Emma’s communication with Miles has broken down completely by the time he shows up in her hotel room and their relationship is effectively over. When Emma and Raquel rescue Marcus, the form of prose is literally broken up, in a scene of chaotic poetry and violence. When Beatriz finally sends word via Rocha for Raquel to visit her on an island that is indeed far from Rio, the mother-daughter reunion is at once both intimate and distant–the words that might bring them together aren’t spoken, only read by the reader.
And yet, there is hope—the end of the novel witnesses that “singular moment.” Ultimately, it is Beatriz’s words that finally bring Emma and Raquel together, spoken aloud, which reveals another aspect of Novey’s love letter – not only to translation, but also to the rhythms of language itself. Translation is a written activity but there is also the translation of communication—when language on the page literally has life breathed into it, and exists with varieties of cadence.
In the denouement of the novel’s final chapters, Emma is alone in her hotel room, thinking about how she worked through the translations of Beatriz’s novels—
With her translations, she’d learned to type for long stretches without ever looking at the screen. She’d keep her face turned to Beatriz’s book, propped open beside her on the desk, or she’d stare out the window and trust her fingers to key in the words as they occurred to her. When she looked back over what she’d typed, there was a kind of magic in seeing that her hands had indeed accurately translated what had come into her mind into sentences on the screen. There was no reason to believe that her fingers wouldn’t comply with a similar kind of magic if the words she was typing up happened to be her own.
Translation is not always such magical work of course; Novey says so when describing her experience of translating Lispector, who passed away well before she translated her novel The Passion According to G.H.: “You can ask a question but you don’t get an answer. The author just stares at you and says nothing and you wonder if the best thing to do would be to get up and run out of the room.”
Still, Novey has beautifully evoked a sense of what it’s like to exist, for better or worse, as Emma herself puts it, “in the vapor between languages,” and while Emma questions the worth of her own writing, it’s clear there’s no question as to the worth of Novey’s, whose fingers have produced a novel that will leave you in a glow, and perhaps yearning for that intimate and singular moment. - Lauren Goldenberg

What's the last novel you read that revolved around a translator? I couldn't think of any, though a Google search reminded me that Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov sometimes worked as a translator, and the narrator chasing his elusive muse in Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl was an interpreter at UNESCO.
Idra Novey, an acclaimed poet and translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature, has written a debut novel that's a fast-paced, beguilingly playful, noirish literary mystery with a translator at its center. Ways to Disappear explores the meaning behind a writer's words — the way they can both hide and reveal deep truths. It begins with a famously unpredictable, cigar-smoking, 60-something Brazilian writer, Beatriz Yagoda, who goes missing — and the devoted young American translator who drops everything in snowy Pittsburgh, including her loyal but crushingly boring longtime boyfriend, to fly down to Rio to join in the search.
The missing writer's daughter, Raquel, isn't exactly thrilled to have Emma Neufeld show up, claiming superior knowledge just because she's intimately familiar with every line of Beatriz Yagoda's books. Raquel has never read them, but she has "no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down—wasn't that the real knowledge of who she was?" This is one of many intriguing questions Novey's novel pursues in its quest for the missing author.
It doesn't take long for Emma, Raquel, and Raquel's dashing, sexy younger brother Marcus to discover the reason for Beatriz's disappearance; that's part of the setup for an ensuing game of cat and mouse which puts them all in danger (and which I'll leave for readers to discover for themselves).
Novey doesn't let any moss grow under her fugitive writer or her narrative. Ways to Disappear proceeds briskly in short, punchy chapters interspersed with gossipy news bulletins from Radio Globo, increasingly desperate emails from Emma's bewildered boyfriend back in Pittsburgh, and the word-obsessed translator's arch parsing of key terms, presented in dictionary form. Among these: "Promise ... 2. A verb used to assure a certain outcome, as in, With time, a translator gets used to promising the impossible the way a loan shark gets used to promising carnage."
Novey's novel delivers on its promises in so many ways. Yes, there's carnage, but there's also exuberant love, revelations of long-buried, unhappy secrets, ruminations about what makes a satisfying life, a publisher's regrets about moral compromises in both his work and his use of his family wealth and connections, and an alternately heartfelt and wry portrait of the satisfactions and anxieties of the generally underappreciated art of translation. Debating whether to clean up her hotel room to hide some incriminating evidence, Emma muses, "In translation, this kind of dilemma was known as domestication. A translator could justify moving around the objects in a sentence if it made it easier for her audience to grasp what was going on ... The problem with domesticating things this way, however, was the possible misplacement of truth."
Ways to Disappear is concerned not just with truth and the risks of its misplacement and misinterpretation, but with the importance of close reading. It's a delightful, inventive paean to writing that generates "real emotion" and "genuine unease." At one point Beatriz's publisher likens literature to steaks on a grill, testing both "for density" as well as "for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the air." This book is seared to perfection, medium rare.
- Heller McAlpin

A novel starring a novelist can often seem a little pleased with itself, as if the author is looking over her shoulder, eager to make a great drama from a greatly uneventful thing. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up “Ways to Disappear,” the first novel by the poet and translator Idra Novey. The protagonist, Emma Neufeld, is a Portuguese-to-English translator devoted to the work of a cult-classic Brazilian writer. Novey herself translates from Portuguese to English, most recently the work of Clarice Lispector, the cult-classic Brazilian writer.

But Novey has wholly eluded the hazards of writing about writers. Instead, this lush and tightly woven novel manages to be a meditation on all forms of translation while still charging forward with the momentum of a bullet.
The novel opens with Beatriz Yagoda, a Brazilian novelist to whom Emma has devoted her career, climbing into an almond tree with a suitcase and a cigar. It’s the last time she’s seen.
When news of her disappearance reaches Emma in Pittsburgh, she takes one look at her boyfriend, whose most pressing concern is “when they might get married, and whether they had to invite everyone from their Road Runners group,” and books a flight to Rio de Janeiro to find her beloved writer. “To leave a person capable of such meticulous devotion was difficult.” Yet Emma, as withdrawn as she is headstrong, manages to do just that.
Emma begins racking her intimate knowledge of Beatriz’s entire oeuvre for clues about where she might have gone. Luckily, a friend of Beatriz’s, Flamenguinho, has gotten in touch, and they arrange to have drinks at her hotel. He turns out to be a loan shark who knows Beatriz is broke but assumes that the publication of her next book in America will solve her $600,000 debt to him.
Flamenguinho, who keeps “posing his questions to her breasts” and has a tattoo of a trash can on his neck, is grossly misinformed about the profit margins on translated fiction in America. “Whatever you get for it in your country,” he says, “half a million is mine, and then I won’t have to kill her.” Though Beatriz is a writer of enough acclaim in Brazil to be tabloid fodder, her tiny American publisher, the perfectly named Elsewhere Press, pays $500 a book.
Novey writes with cool precision and breakneck pacing — all of this transpires in only 14 pages of text, with some chapters almost lean enough to fit on a Post-it.
We next meet Beatriz’s children: a territorial and suspicious daughter, Raquel, and Marcus, a bartending charmer with a “sensual and sleepy” gaze. Raquel resents Emma’s infatuation with her mother, lacking any “patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down — wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?” Unfortunately for Raquel, she gets an answer to this question.
As Emma, Raquel and Beatriz’s longtime publisher and editor, Roberto Rocha, search for the vanished writer, it becomes clear they are each looking for their own version of the same woman, just as a translator sees her own version of a text. Emma seeks her idol; Raquel, her unreliable mother; and Rocha, a writer he’s had more of a role in shaping than either the daughter or translator realizes. Marcus alone seems to seek nothing.
Being defined is being controlled; even deification is a manipulation. And just as Raquel and Emma must see Beatriz’s complete and fallible humanity, Emma has to shed her dopey boyfriend and his narrow definitions of who she is. “What you’re doing down there is not your life,” he says in an email.
These brief, dire emails come in their own little chapters, as do fiction-infused dictionary entries. After the consummation of Marcus and Emma’s affair is the entry for “Between,” with the story folded into the usage examples: “between the two of them,” “between an author and her son,” “between a brief tunnel in Rio and the distant Pittsburgh of one’s cats.” Another series of chapters are excerpts from Radio Globo’s coverage of Beatriz Yagoda’s disappearance, showing yet another version of her story.
While most of these formal experiments enriched the novel’s investigation of definitions dispensed and lived under, one lost me. In a pivotal scene Novey shifted abruptly into a poem that felt overdramatic and muddled crucial action. I reread it in confusion instead of with the pleasure I felt through the rest of this elegant page-turner.
And though it begins as a farce, complete with a comic interruption of midcoital lovers, it gradually takes a serious turn — guns go off, fires burn, a human ear is delivered in a shoe box. Beatriz flees to escape this violence, but in a deeper sense she is trying to slough off the varied definitions placed on her and her work, vanishing to be seen again. - Catherine Lacey

It’s common for authors to casually employ metaphors of motherhood when discussing their books. A book is an author’s “baby.” On Twitter, writers wish each other “happy book birthday” on their books’ publication dates. But what’s more complicated than an author’s relationship to her book is the paradoxical relationship between a translator and her translated text, something that she’s both written and not written. Idra Novey’s elegant, comic debut novel, “Ways to Disappear,” considers intertwined questions of translation, authorial identity and the relationship between mothers and daughters.
The novel opens as celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda climbs into an almond tree with her suitcase and cigar, and disappears. Far away in Pittsburgh, Emma Neufield, a translator of Beatriz’s books, receives an e-mail from a mysterious sender informing her of the disappearance. When she arrives in Rio to help search for Beatriz, she is threatened by the sender: Flamenguinho, a loan shark to whom Beatriz owes $600,000, borrowed to support her secret online gambling addiction.
Neither Beatriz’s intense daughter, Raquel, nor Raquel’s brother, Marcus, an Adonis, has ever read their mother’s magic realist, experimental books. For her part, Raquel “had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down — wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?” She finds Emma’s claim that her mother was an online gambler preposterous. But Marcus checks Beatriz’s computer browser history — the claim is true.
Following a hunch based on one of Beatriz’s early stories, Emma and Marcus ferry to the island of Ilha Grande, winding up in the gossip pages as an item. Meanwhile, Beatriz’s idealistic first publisher, Roberto Rocha, receives a pseudonymous letter from the author requesting money to hide out in a hotel.
“Ways to Disappear” gallops forward, gracefully bending genres of mystery, romance and noir, while considering philosophical ideas and telling a fun, entertaining story besides. A poet with two collections under her belt, Novey uses a light, sensitive touch and a giddy sense of play to explore weighty concepts. Witty dictionary entries, news clippings and the plots of Yagoda’s stories punctuate the narrative, and two crucial plot points are rendered as poetry.
The clues that Emma, Marcus and Raquel follow in trying to locate Beatriz seem to be smart, metafictive allusions to the life of famous Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Like Beatriz, Lispector was mythically beautiful, Jewish and born elsewhere before coming to Brazil at age 2. Cockroaches appear at the novel’s climax. Novey translated Lispector’s unforgettable experimental novel “The Passion According to G.H.” — also featuring a cockroach — for New Directions.
At one point, Beatriz’s first publisher, Rocha, disillusioned after years in the business, considers what he seeks in fiction. It is the same mix of dark gravity and suppleness that he looks for in steaks: “He tested for density as well, for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the air.” He could very well be describing the heady, lush pleasure found in “Ways to Disappear,” a novel whose powers of enchantment rival those of its fictional author.- Anita Felicelli

Idra Novey, Clarice: The Visitor, Sylph Editions, 2014.

In this cahier, American poet Idra Novey explores several notions of translation, through two sequences of poems. In the first sequence, "Letters to C", she addresses the figure and the words of a writer she has recently translated, Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. In the second, "Regarding Marmalade, Cognates, and Visitors", Novey looks at the connections between language, translation, and the hosting of visitors, including her new-born son. Idra Novey's texts are in conversation with works by the artist Erica Baum - images of books that seem both to invite and resist attempts to read them.

"Novey engages in another kind of call-and-response, that of her own poetic letters to Clarice Lispector, echoing Lispector's letters to the novelist Fernando Sabino. Of her experience translating Lispector, Novey asks, 'What was I failing at / before this—and why is it / failure makes a person feel / so irremediably alive?' Indeed, why is the silence between places, between texts, between bodies, always a silence we want to fill? But silence matters as much as voice; and the why doesn't matter." - Sarah Gerard

from Clarice: The Visitor

Visitor, Mid-August

O looks totaled,
older but more wholly
himself as we kiss in the tradition
of his country, where he kissed
a man recently and told
his wife, and things ended,
this man who bends now
to kiss my infant son
then we have nothing
to say—so good and startled
we are after altering
the particles of our lives,
until finally he asks
about my sadness
in his country, how it lasted
on and on and I tell him
it was the brown-yellow of
dead grass on a hill
until the hill was gone.

On Distance as Former Roommate

I serve J a plate she doesn't take,
offer her a softer chair. We were close
as cognates once, nearly holy
to one another—which comes down now
to coming down
to what?
                    To having been cognates once.
Swappable as the agua my son says
for the sky in his tiny find-the-world books.
And we find it—the same blue

 Exit Civilian
Idra Novey, Exit, Civilian, University of Georgia Press, 2012.

“The prisons, courthouses, and hideaways featured in Novey’s National Poetry Series winner are very real, but we don’t encounter so much bars, barbs, and barbed wire as metaphysical shrinkage and change: “Whisper at the door/ of the little prison/ and your voice will become a coin.” Startling.”
-Library Journal
“[T]he book reveals superb acts of attention, by a writer whose reliable moral sense matches her first-rate ear.”
-Publishers Weekly
“Like early French practitioners Bertrand, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, Novey uses the (prose poem) to disrupt bourgeois sensibilities by drawing attention to the unseemly…imperative and timely.”
-Marcela Sulak, Los Angeles Review of Books
“In Exit, Civilian, the thing is the prison, intractably present – and freedom, more than simply a life outside jail, comprises an infinite speculation on the meaning of itself.”
-Ron Slate, On The Seawall
“Novey’s work has always had a subversive quality, exploring unsanctioned facets of identity, and her discoveries here are just as fresh as in her first collection, if more openly dangerous and political. . . . [Her] images and scenes are meticulously constructed, crystalline, inviting us into a parallel world that reflects back the darker parts of our own.”
Michael Simon, Denver Quarterly
“Novey stretches beyond depictions of inmates’ lives to explore the relationship of the prison, as edifice and as idea, to the wider community, the ‘electoral world’ beyond its walls…”
Rowyda Amin, Sidekick Books
“This is a smart and immaculately crafted book that deserves and rewards you.”
Mathias Slavina, The Volta
“In the face of imprisonment, Novey’s poems contain soothing imagery and encourage attention to small details, the  “buttercups and mittens,” small points of hope in a world of “little prisons.”
- Melinda Wilson, Coldfront Magazine
 ”Inspired by her time teaching in the Bard Prison Initiative, this book is full of poems situated in real circumstances, oriented by the concrete details and haunting questions of interacting on a daily basis with the world of prisons. It’s a striking collection.”–Jacob Muncy
“The words ‘spare’ and ‘stark’ repeat often in conversations about this book, and they are apt, but enough emphasis cannot be given to the quiet but vibrant resonance of these poems.”Ryan Sanford Smith
Exit, Civilian stretches the overarching metaphor of prisons in so many unexpected and mind-expanding directions.”Vincent Toro
“We only imagine ourselves free. Idra Novey’s stark, inventive poems hurtle forth with brash lyricism, forcing us to reflect on our roles as captives, alternate swinging open and slamming shut the prison doors. There is no work like this, no tales so beautiful and hurtful, no stanzas that bite this hard and linger this long.-PATRICIA SMITH
In “Exit Civilian,” Idra Novey takes Vasko Popa’s “little box” and morphs it into a “little prison.” The sweetness of the name “little prison” draws us in, and Novey tracks her discomfort with the justice system with surprising and illuminating tenderness. Novey has taught for the Bard Prison Initiative— one poem zooms in on the poignant detail of the crumpling of a wedding dress as it moves into and out of the prison, another imagines a mother named “Trial” giving birth to a child, “Verdict.” I finished this book with these words still in my head: “Do you want to hear more / About the little prison / Have you noticed / It is everywhere.” These poems truly change what and how we see.-MATTHEA HARVEY
“Enter an apple / And come out the teeth marks / In its yellowed core,” writes Idra Novey. In this spare, remarkable collection, she harnesses and transforms prison experience into a visionary exploration where boundaries dissolve, and we find ourselves transformed.-ARTHUR SZE

Idra Novey, The Next Country, Alice James Books, 2008.

“Novey strikes a fine balance between hints and allusions to political history and generalized or allegorical locales, not proper nouns or place names but ‘leaping wells to the underworld’. . .”
Publishers Weekly
“[Novey’s] spare poems are enticing…luring the reader in with just a few compelling, carefully chosen details…leaving the reader to marvel and wonder and want more.-Matthew Thorburn
“Novey’s collection deftly navigates complex ideas about politics, history and memory by creating timeless allegories…The Next Country is a quiet beauty of a book.”-Erica Meitner
“Each poem is a country and as we read we move from country to country, between regions of human experience, through the territory of the imagination… Novey’s appeal to our natural (irresistible) curiosity about where we are, where we are going, and what’s over the next hill, will win every time.”—Joshua Neely
Novey’s observations are genuine, artful, and inhabited. She is mindful of geographic realms; shifts in natural terrain, plants, and animals. She is keenly aware of culture and customs. She is equally mindful of her own center of gravity, i.e., the English language and a slightly shy North American point of vantage. It serves Novey’s poems well.-Scott Hightower
“We could have had different parents, could have been “disappeared” by the dictator, could have returned to the scene just a moment too late.  This is the real mysterious heart of  The Next Country, a dreamlike quality that creates, from concrete experience, a shifting and untethered self.”
-Rachel Richardson

Idra Novey is the author most recently of Clarice: The Visitor, a collection of poems and images in collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her debut novel, Ways to Disappear, is forthcoming in 2016. Novey’s earlier poetry collections are Exit, Civilian, selected by Patricia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series, and The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry. She’s received awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and the PEN Translation Fund.
Writing about Exit, Civilian, Ron Slate observed, “Novey’s pieces seem to condense many reactions into small spaces – cool playfulness, outrage, disorientation, discomfiture, wonderment. At the core, one encounters both curiosity and repulsion, and a query of all motives including her own.” Although Novey packs much into the small spaces of her poems, there is an openness to Novey’s work. In poems like ‘On Returning to My Hometown in 2035’ Novey balances her projection into the future with images tethered to a familiar rural America:
Even the gun shows are gone now, even
the scrapyards, the darkest, farthest barns.
The strip mall half empty since
my elementary years abides only
chemicals now, the lot sequestered
behind fences, its metal tanks checked
each September for leaks in the seals.
 The poem is slyly political beneath its simplicity:
                                            I flew over where
we used to sled, old hills oranged now
for warning, only the edges still brown.
 Novey, in an interview for Commitment Now, said, “I read the news constantly.  I can’t imagine writing without taking into account the world around me.” And while her work is marked by the world we live in, it is not contained by it. Novey’s work is surprisingly imaginative – the curiosity and wonderment that Slate points out is present here, especially at the end of the poem, as Novey flies by in her “Honda pedi-plane.” But what’s really remarkable is the subtle unveiling of perspective in the ending image:
I saw a denier sitting outside
in a lawn chair, her hair so long
it met the ground. There’s no idling in
the skyways now, which is why
I can’t tell you if she was dying.
The poem is filled with images of a desolate, chemical-stained town, but the speaker’s lack of emotionality at the outset keeps the poem from reading overly dark. Even at the end, there’s a matter-of-fact quality to the speaker, who states simply that she can’t tell if the woman is dying but registers no emotional reaction. Perhaps the most telling word in the whole poem is “denier.” Novey seems to imply that the woman sitting outside amid the chemicals is denying the reality of this place in 2035. And while she may or may not be dying, her long hair is a sign of life. There’s a beauty here, in both the image and the speaker’s telling of it. The “denier” begs us, and the speaker, to question the reality of the world: Is it so chemical stained we can’t sit outside anymore, or can we? And while the question is there, the speaker can’t wait for an answer in a place where: “there’s no idling.”
Place is important in much of Novey’s work, from the poems influenced by Central and South America in her first book, The Next County, to those in Exit, Civilian, that are marked by her time spent teaching in the Bard College Prison Initiative. In an interview for Guernica, Novey talks about the importance of place:Place is poetry for me. Understanding where I am, and where I’m not, is what compels me to write, and by “where” I mean both my relationship to a place and also my relationship to how others have experienced it, the different meanings that place may have depending on whether you are a child or an adult, if you are at a point in your life when you are aware of others or not.

Novey began translating while living in Chile and teaching creative writing at a shelter for abused women. She has translated several books of Brazilian poetry and, most recently, Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. Novey teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. -

On Returning to My Hometown in 2035

Even the gun shows are gone now, even
the scrapyards, the darkest, farthest barns.
The strip mall half empty since
my elementary years abides only
chemicals now, the lot sequestered
behind fences, its metal tanks checked
each September for leaks in the seals.
I lost my virginity in a basement here, lost
my balance on a backhoe, had to pick
the gravel out of my knees. For the prom,
my date was the tank man just vaporized
in the heat storm, his data screen open
to augmented porn. This morning
in my Honda pedi-plane, I flew over where
we used to sled, old hills oranged now
for warning, only the edges still brown.
I saw a denier sitting outside
in a lawn chair, her hair so long
it met the ground. There’s no idling in
the skyways now, which is why

I can’t tell you if she was dying.

The Specialist StoryQuarterly
Selected Interviews
Recent Poems
The Visitor Poetry Foundation
La Prima Victoria Poetry Foundation
Essays + Other Online Writing
Proximate Fires Lincoln Center Theater Review
Most Beautiful Word in English The Huffington Post
Our Nearing Epic of World Literature Brooklyn Quarterly Review
On Proximity to Violence Poetry Foundation
On the Amy Award Poets & Writers Magazine


text:
Robin McLean’s debut collection of short stories moves seamlessly from adultery to kidnapping, from assassination plots to extreme geothermal events, all in a voice that is spare and darkly poetic

Robin McLean, Reptile House, BOA Editions, 2015.

The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.

I once sat on a loveseat for several nights in a row, watching a multipart PBS documentary on emotions. What I recall most vividly from this documentary is an experiment conducted on Jason, a young man with Asperger’s syndrome. As he watched a movie, Jason wore a pair of special glasses that allowed researchers to see exactly what he was looking at on the screen. In this way, they could see how Jason processed visual data, and how he created a kind of hierarchy of significance. One scene featured a dramatic and emotional encounter in the foreground—a man and woman, I think, embracing, kissing, whispering endearments—but Jason, as it turns out, was watching the very interesting chandelier in the background. I don’t mean to hard-heartedly ignore or make light of what the experiment reveals about Asperger’s syndrome, but it strikes me that there is an apt analogy here to fiction. This is what good writers do—come at drama indirectly, reverse foreground and background, disrupt conventional priorities, focus on and draw our attention to the “wrong” data. I was reminded of the chandelier when reading the remarkable stories in Robin McLean’s collection, Reptile House. There is no shortage of mayhem and menace in these stories, but they achieve a thrilling and disorienting power by refusing to pay commensurate attention to the life-and-death troubles of people. McLean does not shrink the world down to interpersonal conflict, but instead opens it up to achieve a cosmic perspective that somehow feels both dispassionate and compassionate (Chekhov’s trick). This opening up is wild, surprising, and not a little frightening. I suppose you could call these stories dark, but in their dazzling perspective I find them full of vitality and wonder. —Chris Bachelder

"Tonally and structurally, these marvelous stories have no discernable influences. In her debut collection Robin McLean emerges as a writer with singular voice and vision. I admire this book immoderately, and I hope that readers will find it." - Chris Bachelder

Robin McLean's fiction is harrowing and wry and compassionate, and always both fiercely rooted in the world and fearlessly willing to take chances. I love her keen sense of our inherent strangeness, and her heartening sense of just how important it is that we never stop trying to close the gap between who are and who we aspire to be." - Jim Shepard

 "I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men." - Alden Jones

McLean’s debut collection of short stories moves seamlessly from adultery to kidnapping, from assassination plots to extreme geothermal events, all in a voice that is spare and darkly poetic. In “Cold Snap,” recent divorcée Lilibeth struggles with isolation as her small town is consumed by one of the coldest winter spells in history. In “The True End to All Sad Times,” a man’s unhealthy obsession with a former high school classmate leads to an equally unhealthy infatuation with the driver of the bus the man rides every evening. In the title story, Carl fantasizes about abandoning his life while sitting in the recovery room after the birth of his child. McLean’s characters are lonely in their marriages, isolated from the world around them, and not generally given happy endings. What this book does offer, however, is strangely realistic glimpses into conflicts that are equal parts surreal and hyper-realistic, rendered by a voice that gracefully juxtaposes terse reportage and lyrical insight. The result is a taut volume that explores the fate of the dashed dreamer, offering charming insights into the untidy worlds of people who are not where they thought they’d be. - Publishers Weekly

Characters struggle to control slivers of their fates in the nine stories of McLean’s debut.
McLean’s protagonists are stuck. Carl of “Reptile House” doesn’t love his wife or his newborn child. Lilibeth of “Cold Snap” is literally frozen as her town experiences record-low temperatures. On the heels of a divorce, she reads self-improvement books and attempts to fix up her home, all while actively denying the dire situation: “Don’t believe this empty town,” she reminds herself. “This coldest cold. This Death of the World.” In “No Name Creek” we meet Ben, cast in the shadow of his older brother, Boak. McLean has a knack for stunning sentences that resonate with her characters’ circumstances. While peeing “twin arcs” next to a tree, Ben hears Boak tease him and looks up at the mountains. Ben notes, “The peaks jabbed at the sky and the sky just sat there and took it.” The third-person narrators frequently zoom out, locating the present moment within a cosmic frame. The effect is tragicomic; we witness the immense futility of characters’ lives. When Lilibeth washes her hair, for instance, we follow the water “down her forehead to sink to drain through pipes to tank to leach field, then down, down through pebbles and rocks in layers, between faults toward magma, only to steam up again, spit out someday, maybe some geyser, some national park with buffalo romping and children. Anyway, her hair was clean.” McLean incorporates organizational structures in a few stories: a list of rules in “For Swimmers” and excerpts from handbooks and checklists in “Blue Nevus.” These structures clutter the narrative slightly, taking away from the prose, which shines on its own.
McLean stages yearning and stasis with poignancy and wit. - Kirkus Reviews

To call Robin McLean a storyteller is technically correct but misses the point of her work; McLean doesn’t write stories so much as she writes about them. To this end, her short fiction collection Reptile House examines the malleability of character and plot, as well as how this might be used to subvert the conventions of the genre. Moreover, she wants her readers to actively engage with the characters instead of being passive consumers of narrative. The result is a dazzling debut that signals the arrival of one of fiction’s most compelling new voices.
The collection’s opening story, “Cold Snap,” in which a young woman struggles to maintain a sense of normalcy amid a winter of near-dystopian proportions, establishes a tone that is both gritty and playful:
As the glaciers moved south toward the Capitol, some high points and valleys were spared. Ice slipped around them, while the rising sea pressed the coastlines. Planes dropped from the sky, no one knew why. Engineers volunteered from the private sector. They repaired and upgraded. They drilled for heat in the earth, hot water or steam, to turn the turbines. It was proven science, but the crews were stressed and components untested. Reactor waters were ice rinks boiling in the middles when the sea crawled up over boardwalks and streets, consuming bike paths and smashing hot-dog stands against shopping districts and schools.
Despite the description of the brutal weather, McLean isn’t asking us to sympathize with the characters here, certainly not with our protagonist Lilibeth, who is on the upswing of a divorce. Rather, she wants us to consider what sympathy for a character actually means. It would be easy to let a story like this devolve into some maudlin post-relationship tragedy wherein the reader is strong-armed into pitying Lilibeth. But Lilibeth doesn’t view herself as a victim; in fact, she’s almost comically indifferent to her circumstances, navigating her life with a calm matter-of-factness that belies the weather’s threat:
It felt colder in town than at her house. She stamped her boots and hugged her arms. It felt much colder. She marveled at this impression. How real it seemed, how actual, factual, reliable, true. How apparently based on sensory perception, the nerves in the face, for example, the capillaries of the ears when the hat flew off and tumbled away. The pain in the lungs, deep breaths required for catching the hat, for leaping a drift.
All of which raises an important question, one to which more writers should give consideration: what do we as readers actually hope to take from our characters, and what does this suggest about us? It’s one of the main themes in the book that McLean continues to explore in stories such as “Take the Car Take the Girl,” in which a friendly dinner gathering yields the kind of character revelations one might expect from Carver or O’Connor, and “For Swimmers,” which details a love triangle decades in the making. For all of the tragedy that these characters endure, McLean insists that we not feel sorry for them but that we examine the concept of tragedy objectively. Take, for example, “Blue Nevus,” which takes its name from the caterpillar-shaped mole on the arm of our central character, Roger Cotton. Despite the concerns of his gym compatriots Roger remains aloof, his regard for his health secondary to what the blue nevus suggests about modernity. “The Middle Ages was a better time to live,” he considers. “Life spans were shorter and more defined. Smallpox and Black Plague took people quickly regardless of sin or previous health.”
The methodical feel to the stories in Reptile House speaks to McLean’s intimate understanding of form. Perhaps more important, however, is her interest in finding ways to undermine the strictures of form. For example, in our title story when the main character is witnessing the birth of his child:
“Carl, cut the cord,” [his wife] said.
“Cut the cord,” he repeated, and set a hand on the knee.
Carl had done it for the others and this, he felt, was more than his share. The other kids were tucked in and away for a few days at her sister’s spread in Winnetka, not far from his parents’ old farm. His own modest house off Cicero, just southwest of downtown, was enticingly empty tonight, all five windows to the street, three on top and two on each side of the red door, would be dark. He hoped to get home tonight and sleep in some big empty bed, in all that still and lonesome.
Here our protagonist’s warped sense of priority establishes a very clear conflict while also emblemizing McLean’s knack for portraying characters as researchers observing their own lives as a kind of experiment, turning the mundane into something extraordinary. Time and again, McLean uncovers a kind of beauty in the ordinary, a sense of wonder in the everyday objects and events that might otherwise fly entirely below our radar.
Much of this has to do with the prose, which is sharp and concise and tinged with a poetic flare. In the same vein as authors such as Amy Hempel and Ben Fountain, McLean works predominantly on the sentence level, ensuring that each paragraph resounds with meaning and metaphor. More than once I found myself lingering on a line or passage, admiring its elegant rhythm, like in “No Name Creek,” when McLean writes, “The peaks jabbed at the sky and the sky just sat there and took it.” Or in “The True End to All Sad Times,” when we are told that hate “is like a rock in the dirt that a guy finds when he digs deep enough with a shovel.”
McLean’s insistence that readers engage with each story as its own object, examining the sizes and shapes and textures and dimensions, points to her steadfast command of language. And in most cases this works, though once or twice I did find myself frustrated at some of the stories’ insularity. That’s not to say that every creative choice she makes needs to broadcast its function to the reader (and to be honest, I sort of hate when authors do this). But why, for instance, was “Blue Nevus” organized with subheadings from the handbook of a space agency? Why do so many of McLean’s characters seem so reluctant feel anything? It’s as if the author is so concerned the stories will slip into contrivance that she is overcompensating by withholding critical details that could make them even richer.
But these instances were hardly enough to spoil the entire book for me. In fact, to a large degree the mystery here made the reading experience that much more rewarding, because I am still thinking about these stories, still turning those objects over in my head like the strange but stunning artifacts of someone else’s life. And that, I suppose, is Reptile House’s most impressive accomplishment: for better or worse, it is the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve finished it, begging to be revisited over and over again. - Jeremy Griffin

Robin McLean’s story collection, Reptile House, opens at an end—when a freeze of apocalyptic proportions devastates the town of Easter, (“Cold Snap”)—and ends at a beginning—when an unhappy man’s wife gives birth to another baby (the title story). This sort of upset runs rampant throughout McLean’s debut work. McLean’s surreal tales about ordinary characters deliver emotional truth in poetic language. Concrete and surreal, they spill beyond the conventional short story forms.
A book for lovers of language, Reptile House won the 2015 BOA Short Story Fiction Prize, sponsored by BOA Editions, Ltd., a publishing house committed strictly to poetry, until 2007 when it launched its American Reader Series with the goal of publishing fiction “more concerned with artfulness of writing than the twists and turns of plot.” Indeed, the nine short stories that form Reptile House seem to spring from language in an intuitive way.
This passage from “No Name Creek,” a story in which two brothers, Ben and Boak, head out to hunt moose on the last day of the season is a primer in the way Mclean’s stories feed off language on multiple levels. Ben, the narrator who happens to be a poet, tells a complex story of lost love and fraternal competition by defining simple words:

     Hand: a necessary appendage….
     Poem: a set of words put together to say something that can’t be said. Ben once slid one in Sue’s mailbox in his best pretty longhand, but Ben’s longhand and Boak’s longhand were perfect twins.
     Mix-up: a mess that causes the wrong or undesired result, brought about by fear or happiness or love or an absent mind or poor penmanship.
     Sue: pretty, sweet, nice, sets her chin on her knuckles while listening. Gap-toothed. Holds her head while laughing hard.
     Mix-up: a terrible mess brought about by poems. Boak won that won too. Boak always won.
     “Wins what?” said Boak.
     “Nothing,” said Ben.
     “How the world is declining,” Boak said. They shook their heads at injustice. The brothers walked on, sweated and walked. They heard gunfire the next drainage over and walked faster.
     Leg: a necessary appendage, needing another.
Ben’s definition of leg, which circles back to his definition of hand, also refers to the brothers’ dependence on each other, despite Ben’s pain since Boak married Sue.

McLean’s language is generally more elusive and intricate than this particular example suggests. Her usually omniscient narrators often express themselves in stream-of-consciousness. They are contemplatives, dreamers and fantasizers, historians and fable-tellers. They know both the future and the past.

In “The Amazing Discovery and Natural History of Carlsbad Caverns,” first published in The Common, Mel and Mike, two volatile young soldiers who are due to ship out to Vietnam, drink all night, procure a pistol, kidnap, and kill a local cab driver before going AWOL in the desert. This plot, which includes the chase and attack of a vulnerable woman and random details, like the fate of Mike’s belt—(“But the belt was gone forever, kicked under the bar by a girl’s pink heel, never to be discovered by anyone ever, although a long-handled broom will almost grab it next Easter.”)—is ample material for a short story, but “The Amazing Discovery…” also incorporates a mysterious and magical sombrero, cavern folklore, the bedtime stories about a cowboy named Jim that the cabbie tells his four children—complete stories in themselves—history, fantasy, magical realism, the afterlife and even the beforelife, when the cabbie’s cave tales merge with the main narrative:

Way back, this desert was an inland sea. These mountains were coral reefs with caves big enough to fit a town. The reef hugged the eastern shore, eel and sharks, the sponges and urchin had children who grew up and had children who died on the reef and it rose up fine and tall with all their corpses.
The paragraph continues, intertwining geology with the the cabbie’s daughter losing her tooth and a Cowboy Jim episode.
Jim rubbed his leg in the dark, the real dark, and a real leg with a real boot on the end of it. This desert was once an inland sea and Gloria tripped on the foot of the table. Just a little sprite. Of course, there was blood, the girl had cried, but Jim had groped the ground and found her tooth. Time passed, ten million years. Jim dipped the tooth in the pail until clean, the roots of the tooth were exactly like a screw. He held her head between his knees, the small glorious head, one million years passed, and the reef busted out lean and sharp, those mountains there, brown and pretty, a girl’s round belly, round as a melon on account of breakfast, and screwed that tooth back in her head…
McLean’s next paragraph returns us to the story at hand:
The cab cut east some miles. The moon set. The searchlights lay down. The cab halted nose up on a dune that looked exactly like a cresting wave. Mel got out and kicked the tires. Mike sang a marching tune, the stars faded to a slice of sun.
“Get out and dance,” Mel said.
Such juxtapositions of epic and human-scale elements define McLean’s work and ambition as much as her innovative prose. While “The Amazing Discovery…” is the most complex of these stories, “Rabbit’s Foot,” in which William, the youngest and favored brother of seven, becomes entangled in a rooftop bar fight while defending his older brother, is perhaps the most accessible. It begins:
“Fight on the roof!” A steel door slammed above.
Tommy clapped his hands. “Let’s go.” He jumped two steps at a time and Billy followed skipping three steps at a time up the stairwell to the roof party.
The fight was more of a skirmish: two guys, one girl, someone’s dog. It was mostly played out by the time Tommy and Billy slammed through the door. The contestants were still chest-to-chest at the burn barrel.
As the evening wears on, another fight develops. This time Tommy and Billy are in the middle of it, and McLean shifts to her poetic voice to encapsulate the story’s tragic elements.
     …Then Billy fell.
     A satellite circling within earth’s gravity is falling the whole time.
     He fell for an hour, equals forty boys back-to-back, or twelve girls with some pleasure.
     The air was nice. The snow slapped his chin.
     A fly is the lowest thing always repenting.
     A siren for a meteor a mile wide crossing Polish gibberish.
 “Rabbit’s Foot” concludes:
     The snow will be one hundred feet deep, I promise, silky like flour.
     Brothers with nets, yes.
     Flowers, yes.
     Dragon girls, yes.
     The headline: Miracle Boy.
     No cornfield or cow.
     Super Bill, Sweet William.
     Out of my way.
It’s risky work, and it succeeds better in some stories than others. In “Take the Car Take the Girl,” a wife seeks revenge on her cheating husband by arranging to steal his new and much adored car and give it to a busboy who’s caught her attention one night in a restaurant. The story is told in a close third-person point of view that shifts four-fifths of the way through the story, abandoning the wife, Tweedy, and the story of her complicated and troubled marriage in which the reader has become invested to escort the busboy into his future with the stolen car. Unfortunately, his story isn’t nearly as interesting as Tweedy’s, making for an unsatisfying conclusion that reads like the author got lost.
For the most part, however, McLean knows exactly where she’s going and takes care to ground her stories in realistic settings and vivid scenes. For instance, “Cold Snap,” the apocalyptic opening story concerns a woman, Lilibeth, who rebuilds her world after the emotional freeze of divorce and the climate freeze. The story begins:

In December, the valley cars barely turned over. Batteries died. Blankets were coiled on the sills of frosted windows, tacked over ill-fitting doors. Wood split with the tap of an axe. The ice on the lake was three feet thick, then five, then seven, then the auger froze. When the wind died down, the townsfolk had parties on the lake below the Ledges, the deepest part of the lake, so warmest water, so best fishing. The fish huts all huddled together. The friends built fires in the middle of pallets with brush hauled out in trucks parked behind the huts. The fire was taller than the roofs. It leaned with the wind. They drank hot drinks with gloves, red noses at rims, leaned away from the lick of the flame….”
The miseries of McLean’s characters throughout the collection are also familiar: Lilibeth is recovering from divorce; another woman’s lover won’t leave his wife; a man is obsessed with his high school crush.
Snappy, realistic dialogue further helps the reader relate to Reptile House’s characters and infuses McLean’s epic themes and compressed prose with a welcome humor. As the “The Amazing Discovery…”  approaches the tragic climax, which the story has been promising and threatening, since its opening paragraph—“Mel could get Mike to do anything,” this is the dialogue McLean attributes to the intoxicated soldiers:

     “My dad’s in the field by now. He’s fighting with that plow.”
     “He’ll get a dog.”
     “What good’s a dog?”
     “Dogs are fine.”
     Mike drank the last of the bottle and threw it out onto the sand.
     “A nice home for some bug or a mouse,” Mike said.
     “They’ll cook in that bottle by noon,” said Mel. “Some friend you are.”
     “Jungle men cook bugs and mice from the mud in a bottle,” said Mike.
     The cactus gave way to the tires and grill. The cab lunged and weaved through the sand.
Mike and Mel have forced the driver dangerously deep into the desert, nearing the legendary Carlsbad caverns—“the blackest hole you ever saw.” This banter belies the gravity of the situation. They, too, could be cooked by noon under the heat of the desert sun.
McLean’s collection concludes with, and takes its title from, “Reptile House.” When Carl’s wife gives birth to another child, Carl, apathetic in his marriage, goes through the motions of cutting the cord and tending to his wife in the hospital, while fantasizing about zipping “out of his skin,” escaping to another life. That’s when he recalls an incident at the zoo’s Reptile House, when a 12-foot python swallowed whole the second snake in the cage.

To the guys at work he described how the final snake had two tails for a while, one pointing each direction, the gaping mouth in the middle, the brown tail flapping then still. Gulped shorter and shorter until gone. This was odd to see.
The zookeepers had said of the incident: “Unnatural, unprecedented, as far as we know.”They could just as well be describing this collection. - Chantal Corcoran

 "Robin McLean writes in wonderful cascades of language. Her characters are carried along by those cascades, often unwittingly. Sometimes, as with the two young men in “No Name Creek,” they are carried to a happy end. More often, they seem to be, like Lilibeth in “Cold Snap,” overtaken by events beyond their control. Characters’ own words, often inept or pathetic in light of their situations, offer ironic counterpoint. Much is laughable in these stories. Don’t be deceived. Through her sly wit and humor, Robin McLean is luring readers into deeper questions." - Frank Soos