The Emily Fables

Fiction. All of Stephanie Dickinson’s works are about language: taut, urgent, effervescent. Her extraordinary talent shimmies in the daylight of her paged ruminations, in the night of her haunting revelations. Reading Stephanie Dickinson is like being thrown back in time to a more careful, more erudite, era of writing rising off the wings of a brilliance seldom seen these days; maybe it’s because her ‘Emily’ pieces speak of that gentler time. Yet next to Annie Dillard, I’m not sure I’ve met Dickinson’s contemporary equal. Her works are all about the lucid, arresting turns of phrase that make language as surprising and re-readable as it should be. Chila Woychik