RACHEL HALL
“Hall's vision crosses borders and generations, through language at once lyrical and deeply distilled” —Nancy Reisman
Rachel Hall is the author Heirlooms (BkMk Press), selected by Marge Piercy for the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize and awarded the Phillip McMath Post-Publication Award. Hall’s stories and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Bellevue Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fifth Wednesday, Gettysburg Review, Natural Bridge, New England Review, and Water~Stone. In addition, she has received awards and honors from publications such as Lilith, Glimmer Train, and New Letters and from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ragdale, and the Ox-Bow School of the Arts.
“Heirlooms is an exquisite and thrilling collection. In fearless and incandescent prose, Rachel Hall traces the fragile resilience and quiet horrors of those displaced by war. She happens to be writing about the Second World War, but these are stories that speak to the essential human experiences of exile and loss and survival. Heirlooms captures what it is to be a refugee, and an immigrant, with a delicacy and precision that delights and haunts.”
STEVE ALMOND
AUTHOR OF CANDYFREAK and AGAINST FOOTBALL
“HEIRLOOMS is a fascinating series of interconnected stories about members of an extended family of Jews before, during and long after the holocaust, in France, in Israel, in the United States. Different women and men define themselves in resistance, denial and ignorance of history through four generations...In some ways the entire book is a meditation on the meaning of family and history.”
MARGE PIERCY
ICONIC FEMINIST, POET, and NOVELIST
“Heirlooms is a masterful collection, infused with devastating beauty. Focusing her precise artistry on the chaos of war, Rachel Hall succeeds in animating loss, preserving memory, and adding powerful imaginative truth to the historical record.”
JOANNA SCOTT
AUTHOR OF THE MANIKIN and FOLLOW ME
“In HEIRLOOMS, Rachel Hall has built an irresistible and gem lit kaleidoscope, capturing within it the intricate, ephemeral private moments of women and men fleeing wartime violence, neighbors who bear witness or turn away, and children who carry the legacies. Each turn brings another vital angle, another dimension: Hall's vision crosses borders and generations, through language at once lyrical and deeply distilled. Heirlooms is a beautiful, transporting, and necessary book.”
NANCY REISMAN
AUTHOR OF THE FIRST DESIRE and TROMPE L’OEIL