Sara Schaff received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her stories have appeared in Inkwell and Carve Magazine, and she was awarded a residency from the Ragdale Foundation to begin work on a novel. She loves and recommends The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, and Heir to the Glimmering World, by Cynthia Ozick.
Character likability. “Plot-driven” as pejorative. Research limits in historical fiction. The mail-order-bride as escape route. The double-edged sword of social media. Anna Solomon tells it straight in this conversation with Sara Schaff.
Joan Silber’s elegant sixth book, The Size of the World, probes what one character describes as “the elusive connection between happiness and place.” In prose both beautiful and spare, Silber crafts a novel of thematically linked stories that span continents and generations, and whose predominantly American characters look for adventure and contentment abroad—or in the arms of lovers who will always remain, at the core, unknowable.
