In the Time of the Girls

by Anne Germanacos

Overview

Born in San Francisco, Anne Germanacos has lived between Greece and San Francisco for thirty years. Her stories are just as strange and tragic as the Greek myths they riff on. Using a spare, image-laden prose style, Germanacos focuses on discrete, telling moments to create fast-paced stories that pack a powerful punch. This is not your standard short story collection—it is an innovative work of literary prose as brilliant, concise, and potent as a bolt of lightning from the hand of Zeus.

About In the Time of Girls, Germanacos

From Consortium Library Express:

“This innovative debut from Anne Germanacos uses discrete, telling moments to create gripping stories that are richly pleasurably to read. heavily informed by her life in Greece, these stories are often just as strange and tragic as the myths they riff on...In the Time of Girls is not your standard short story collection- it is an innovative work of literary prose as brilliantly concise and potent as a bolt of lightning from the hand of Zeus.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934414385
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/01/2010
Series:	American Readers Series
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Anne Germanacos, together with her husband, Nick Germanacos, ran the Ithaka Cultural Studies Program on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete, and taught writing, literature, and Modern Greek. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her stories have appeared in, among other places, Black Warrior Review, Santa Monica Review, and, DIAGRAM. She was awarded the Holmes Award for emerging writers from Fourteen Hills. In the Time of the Girls is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

Germanacos's debut is made up of brief fictional moments that straddle the line between prose and poetry and culminate in a vigorous but altogether elusive narrative. The stories constructed from these moments (some less than 10 words long) reflect on family, parenting, teaching, marriage, sexuality, and modern dilemmas, all loosely framed in the ancient context of Greek history and mythology. Character names often come from myths, and detached prose compels the reader to imagine the connections that string these people together. Germanacos's Odysseus plays backgammon with an Iranian rug seller while on vacation; Themistocles drives a dirty VW bug with a peahen riding shotgun. The beauty of this unconventional collection is in its details: each moment offers a glimpse at a larger story while giving the reader intimate, wry, and acute details about the narrator or her surrounding characters. This makes for a light and lively reading experience as each moment spins into the next without reaching a cohesive whole; Germanacos's vision doesn't extend quite that far. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"The seductive, sly, smart fictions in Anne Germanacos’s debut display a remarkable range. These astute stories investigate matters personal and public, religious and political, physical and psychological—all in a language that’s forthright and clear, yet wonderfully allusive as well. Germanacos’s tales tackle big questions about the making, keeping, and risking of love. Ultimately, they interrogate selfhood: can it stand up to the questioning? We need this kind of rigor and playfulness—and candor."

--Martha Cooley, author of The Archivist and Thirty-Three Swoons

"Anne Germanacos takes us into a rich mythic and poetic world and crafts an astonishing array of characters in a dreamscape that ignites imagination and vision and compels us to see far beyond the ordinary and the mundane into an extraordinary range of human emotion. She is a gifted storyteller whose inventiveness with both language and form will transport and amaze."

--Michael Krasny, host of KQED's Forum, author of Off Mike, A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life

“In In the Time of the Girls, Anne Germanacos has hammered the solid of expected form to disclose the fine fracture lines that map how it really is—between men and women, women and women, myths and memories…The echoing narratives convey a rich, mysterious flow of possibility, and a sense of ancient energies pushing up into the ongoing present.“

--Sven Birkerts, author of My Sky Blue Trades: Growing up Counter in a Contrary Time

Germanacos’ inquisitive eye scans the landscape from rural Greece to urban San Francisco. Her haunting, compressed narratives are as elegant and detailed as Persian miniatures. The gods live in these rich tales, and so do 21st century wives and husbands, sons and daughters, priests and artists.

--Louise Steinman, author of The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War

"Anne Germanacos’ literary form defies traditional classification—bridging prose and poetry—it must be experienced. Each piece is a small gem. Her cavalcade of human beings—their emotions, their worlds—is arresting, haunting, memorable."

--Howard Gardner, author of CREATING MINDS

From the Publisher