Equally comedic and poignant, Adam Prince’s story “Way Back, Well Before My Divorce,” winner of our 2021 William Peden Prize in fiction, examines the many faces of naivete, from hopeful crowd members betting on a rigged shell game to a young man unknowingly crossing an invisible boundary with his girlfriend’s sister.
Here’s what novelist Michael Byers, the guest judge who selected this story as the winner of our annual best-of-volume prize, had to say about the story:
“It builds a portrait of a clueless young man who thinks he has all the answers while also, and this was especially gratifying, making me appreciate the form of the short story in a new way, i.e., it never says what it’s about but is firm enough in its shape to be entirely clear; it asks questions rather than delivers answers; and it too is vivid and memorable–all while being quite short! In itself a kind of sleight-of-hand game.”
Way Back, Well Befor
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Professional musicians often rankle at the way their lives are portrayed in the media. It’s disheartening to see the profession glamorized or over-romanticized, given the untold hours of grinding practice and self-imposed discipline that goes into mastering a musical instrument. Then there’s the tendency of films and television to screw up even the most obvious details — a guitar strummed with the wrong hand, a conductor’s motions totally at odds with the soundtrack, string players with helter-skelter bows and gnarly grabb positions.
In her new novel, “Sight Reading,” Cambridge author Daphne Kalotay (“Russian Winter”) sets the story of four interconnected characters mitt i Boston’s classical music scene. While she does tend to romanticize a bit, she also takes great pains to get the little details right, both musical and geographical, and the resulting read is engaging and often insightful.
At the center of the story is Nicholas Elko, a composer struggling with what he expects
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Audiobooks by Daphne Kalotay
Russian Winter: A Novel
A mysterious jewel holds the key to a life-changing secret, in this breathtaking tale of love and art, betrayal and redemption. When she decides to auction her remarkable jewelry collection, Nina Revskaya, once a great star of the Bolshoi Ballet, believes she has finally drawn a curtain on her past. Instead, the former ballerina finds herself overwhelmed by memories of her homeland and of the events, both glorious and heartbreaking, that changed the course of her life half a century ago. It was in Russia that she discovered the magic of the theater; that she fell in love with the poet Viktor Elsin; that she and her dearest companions'Gersh, a brilliant composer, and the exquisite Vera, Nina's closest friend'became victims of Stalinist aggression. And it was in Russia that a terrible discovery incited a deadly act of betrayal'and an ingenious escape that led Nina to the West and eventually to Boston. Nina has kept her secrets f
