Paper Conspiracies
Susan Daitch
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Summary
Daitch is well known in contemporary literary circles. Her short fiction has appeared in Tinhouse, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, Guernica, Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, Pushcart Prize anthology, The Brooklyn Rail, Ploughshares, The Voice Literary Supplement, and Bomb magazine, among others. Her work was the subject of an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction along with that of David Foster Wallace and William Vollman. The Dreyfus Book is about characters who were only indirectly involved in the Dreyfus espionage case, the tangential players who participated far from the main stage: petty forgers, cross dressers, actors in early silent films, and film restorers. It's unique because it works from the outside of an event, giving a kind of rat’s eye view and then telescopes in to a bigger picture. The book combines the dense pack of David Foster Wallace’s experimentation with the mining of history as W.E. Siebald does in interconnected novella-like chapters. Like Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, there’s an element of a crime story, a mystery, interlaced with a comic voice that doesn’t take itself too seriously.