Daphne Kalotay
Daphne Kalotay grew up in New Jersey, where her parents had relocated from Ontario; her mother is Canadian, while her father came from Hungary to Canada as a teen. Daphne attended Vassar College, majoring in psychology, before moving to Boston to attend Boston University's graduate program in fiction writing. She stayed on to earn a PhD in Modern and Contemporary literature, writing her dissertation on one of her favorite writers, Mavis Gallant. Her interview with Mavis Gallant can be found in the Paris Review's Writers-at-work series. At Boston University, Daphne's stories won the school's Florence Engell Randall Fiction Prize and a Henfield Foundation Award. Her first book, the fiction collection Calamity and Other Stories, was short-listed for the Story Prize and includes work first published in Agni, Good Housekeeping, The Literary Review, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her debut novel, the international bestseller Russian Winter, won the 2011 Writers' League of Texas Award in Fiction. Her second novel, the Boston Globe bestseller Sight Reading, won the New England Society Book Award in Fiction, and her third novel, Blue Hours, was a Massachusetts Book Awards "Must Read." Her new collection, The Archivists, is the winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Daphne has taught literature and creative writing at Boston University, University of Massachusetts, Harvard University, Skidmore College, Middlebury College, and Princeton University. She lives in the Boston area.
“Just like with love. It's all or nothing. ... That's why love is dangerous. We stand up for love. We take risks. Well, you of all people know about that - your own Soviet Russia, an entire nation rearranged to discourage love for anything other than one's country.' Because love caused people to think for themselves, to look out for themselves and their loved ones.”
“Of course he knew what kinds of thoughts these were: the not-always-true ones, conveniently forgetting the other times, when he and Christine had bickered at the smallest thing, aggravated by the other's mere constant presence, and sometimes even said awful things--irreversible and stinging-- that lingered like a foul odor for a long time afterward. Then there were long stretches of calm. And yet the bickering, the irritation, that too was part of the delicate glue that kept them together, still feeling something, even when they grew, sometimes for long periods, bored with each other, tired of each other, before settling back into their more usual, tamed and tamped down but still real and extant love.”
“How lucky Drew was to have this mother of hers, this constant, reliable, if at times irritating presence in her life--this mother, like so many other mothers, beloved and blamed. Lucky she was to have experience, through her mother, the twisted intricaciesof deep, and deeply complex, love.”
“It was the comfort of knowing that she was not quite so strange, that there were other people who found delight in private challenges and quiet lives. People who lived in their thoughts as much as in the real, physical world.”
“...she immediately became the person they believed her to be: a peculiar, impatient girl, attractive enough yet too old and odd for the village boys who had once been her friends.”
“No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone.”
“...there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.”
“...the way the diamond caused people to reasses her--their palpable appreciation that Drew was loved by someone, was someone worth loving”
“...She looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were.”
“It wasn't that she didn't believe in love; but she no longer believed in it for herself.”
“I remember when I left Hungary," Zoltan said, "understanding so completely that literature could save me as much as it could get me killed. Of course it's not like that here. But isn't it funny, that in some ways the price one pays for freedom of speech is ... a kind of indifference.”