Welcome!
It was an honor and thrill to appear on Thursday, Feb 17th at 10:00 AM (Pacific time) at the UCR Writers Week Festival with Ibrahim Nasrallah, the internationally acclaimed Palestinian author who Zoomed in from his home in Jordan. If you missed it, never fear, you can still see the recording here: Diane Lefer & Ibrahim Nasrallah – Crowdcast
Nasrallah's poems blew me away. I read from my novel, Out of Place, published September 13, 2021 by Fomite Press. Happening 20 years after 9/11, but M.C. Armstrong writing in The Wrath-Bearing Tree calls it "timely...a book about the people who do not fit into the dominant narrative of The Forever War."
Check out reviews and Events here. Look below for links to other books. Or please see the Fiction page for my other novels and story collections as well as some stories available online.
About Out of Place:
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 was 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. (And of course it's a pleasure to be included in the Among Animals anthology, published April 2022 by Ashland Creek, publishers of ecolit. Here's a link to the interview about my story and info about the book.)
In the run-up to the Out of Place pub date, every Monday, I posted another image giving a hint about the novel's contents. (You can find all the Monday images collected here.) The final week's image:
Nasrallah's poems blew me away. I read from my novel, Out of Place, published September 13, 2021 by Fomite Press. Happening 20 years after 9/11, but M.C. Armstrong writing in The Wrath-Bearing Tree calls it "timely...a book about the people who do not fit into the dominant narrative of The Forever War."
Check out reviews and Events here. Look below for links to other books. Or please see the Fiction page for my other novels and story collections as well as some stories available online.
About Out of Place:
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 was 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. (And of course it's a pleasure to be included in the Among Animals anthology, published April 2022 by Ashland Creek, publishers of ecolit. Here's a link to the interview about my story and info about the book.)
In the run-up to the Out of Place pub date, every Monday, I posted another image giving a hint about the novel's contents. (You can find all the Monday images collected here.) The final week's image:
Also by Diane Lefer
Confessions of a Carnivore
"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
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California Transit
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.
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For more books and stories, please check out Fiction page. For Nonfiction books and essays, please go here. |
