Welcome! 

​My new novel, Out of Place, has a pub date:
​September 13, 2021. You can read the opening page here.

Here's the cover, and every Monday I will post another image below that gives a hint about the novel's contents. Take the hint, please! (You can find all the Monday images here.)

About the book:

When a research institute in the Mojave Desert falls under suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11, a Turkish hydrogeologist is “in the wind”; the American office manager is detained as a material witness; a Mexican herpetologist needs to find a place of safety; a US college dropout bicycles across Iran trying to decide if violence is the answer; DIY citizen-scientists conduct unconventional experiments; and an FBI specialist, born in a refugee camp in Africa, proves his loyalty to his adopted country.

For me, it's been a strange experience correcting proofs of this novel set in the years 2000-03. After everything that's happened more recently, I had almost forgotten: how the Bush administration violated democratic norms, undermined science, disseminated lies, and attacked immigrants. As I continue to work on behalf of asylum seekers and for immigrant rights, we need to remember.

I often turn for relief to non-human animals when the way people treat each other gets to be too much, so I shouldn't have been surprised in rereading my own work to find rattlesnakes and bears and vultures and monkeys and goats and, of course, lots of cats.

​This week's image:

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Also by Diane Lefer

Confessions of a Carnivore

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"I haven't read a novel in ages with so much packed into every sentence--Confessions is romp, satire, stand-up schtick, Restoration comedy. All about: gorilla/guerrilla theater, sex and love, driving in LA, standing up for those who have no one else to bother, Buddhism, the Church of Neoproctology (colonics and LA seem to go, well, hand in glove), vivisection, life on the Rez, murder in Tijuana...Diane Lefer has stories to tell, and she's clearly lived on the edges of things and thoughts that most people only read about." - George Ovitt

​
The Blessing Next to the Wound (with Hector Aristizabal)

​"This aptly titled book draws a spiritual path to transcend physical and psychic wounds, whether they come from political persecution, domestic abuse, gang violence, exile, or poverty.   In this remarkable and powerful personal narrative, Hector Aristizabal portrays his own transformation—from a torture victim to a spiritual guide strong enough, artistic enough, and, ultimately, blessed enough, to lift other lost souls into the light." - Sue William Silverman

California Transit

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​Awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
The stories in the collection are "smart, well written and have that most elusive of qualities: vitality. They take on difficult issues — immigration, racism, torture, animal suffering, environmental degradation. That makes her stories sound humorless; they aren't. A vein of wry wit runs through them." - Judith Freeman in the Los Angeles Times. ​​

​The Fiery Alphabet​

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 ​“Enchanting and wondrous... In a voice as unique and thrilling as any I’ve encountered in literature, Daniela Messo seeks the secrets not only of her past, but of life itself.”—Robin Oliveira

 
​For more books and stories, please check out Fiction page. For Nonfiction books and essays, please go here.