“A mosaic mystery told in vignettes, cliffhangers, curious asides, and some surreal plot twists as Raffel investigates the secrets of the man who changed infant care in America.”—NPR, 2018's Great Reads What kind of doctor puts his patients on display? This is the spellbinding tale of a mysterious Coney Island doctor who revolutionized neonatal care more than one hundred years ago and saved some seven thousand babies. Dr. Martin Couney's story is a kaleidoscopic ride through the intersection of ebullient entrepreneurship, enlightened pediatric care, and the wild culture of world's fairs at the beginning of the American Century. As Dawn Raffel recounts, Dr. Couney used incubators and careful nursing to keep previously doomed infants alive, while displaying these babies alongside sword swallowers, bearded ladies, and burlesque shows at Coney Island, Atlantic City, and venues across the nation. How this turn-of-the-twentieth-century émigré became the savior to families with premature infants—known then as “weaklings”—as he ignored the scorn of the medical establishment and fought the rising popularity of eugenics is one of the most astounding stories of modern medicine. Dr. Couney, for all his entrepreneurial gusto, is a surprisingly appealing character, someone who genuinely cared for the well-being of his tiny patients. But he had something to hide... Drawing on historical documents, original reportage, and interviews with surviving patients, Dawn Raffel tells the marvelously eccentric story of Couney's mysterious carnival career, his larger-than-life personality, and his unprecedented success as the savior of the fragile wonders that are tiny, tiny babies. A New York Times Book Review New &amp; Noteworthy Title A Real Simple Best Book of 2018 Christopher Award-winner

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies

Biographies & Memoirs

Raffel, Dawn

Professionals & Academics

Blue Rider Press

Dawn Raffel's debut delivers us to the wild spaces of a youth in the Midwest and to the blank terrors of the heart. There is a cold wind blowing through these stories, whose sentences come to us as a rebuke to anything felt. In her flight from sentiment, Raffel masterfully reifies the new will to absence that marks the moral and emotional bearing of her generation. The result is not just an acknowledgment of all our long divisions - the divide between impulse and the means to apprehend it, between desire and entrapment - but of the final sweet concession that we must each of us make to the futility of even the smallest mending. In the Year of Long Division gives us the triumph of craft over the obstinance of expression and the installation of a writer certain to be cited in the continuing reinvention of the American short story.

In The Year Of The Long Division: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Literary

KNOPF

Carrying the Body: A Novel

Elise, a young woman with a mysteriously ill son, returns to her childhood home years after running away with a lover. Now destitute, she begins to search for an object hidden somewhere in the house, which has been in a state of disrepair since her mother's untimely death. Her father, who fled political terror in in his youth, is frail and often dreaming. So it falls to Elise's older sister, who has never left home, to maintain family order. Unraveled by alcohol and her own longing for escape, "Aunt," as Elise's sister is simply known, is further disturbed by the child's illness and his mother's irresponsibility. To placate the child, she turns to the bedtime tale of the Three Little Pigs, which becomes increasingly corrupted with each telling. As Aunt struggles to take care of the child, she recalls -- with a mixture of jealousy and resentment -- the day her sister left home. Meanwhile, Elise continues her search, with consequences that will alter Aunt's life irrevocably. A writer of "obvious and extreme talent" (Los Angeles Times), Raffel uses starkly beautiful, stunningly precise language to etch this compelling portrait of a family torn apart by longing, miscommunication, and misdirected love. Meticulously crafted and utterly absorbing, Carrying The Body is ultimately about the inescapable emotional legacies passed from generation to generation, and our dreams of refuge and release.

Romance

Scribner

Dawn Raffel's stories are like prismatic drops of rain, hanging from the edge of a roof or sliding down a windshield, reflecting an entire world within. The language of motherhood, of adulthood, of childhood the language of family and individual has never been like this. Sly and probing, with the sting of precision and pain.” Susan Straight In Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe the oppressive truth of our mortality unsettles but does not vanquish the spirit. The woman as drudge may be "a failure at folding," but she is a rare songmaker whose dialogues with a son, a sister the usual figures from the family romance make for a musical and philosophical call and response. The son proposes one way to keep birds from crashing into fatally clear windows is to open the windows all over the world.’ These stories promise more life. Take them to heart!” Christine Schutt When Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her nightly from The Restless Universea layman’s guide to physics by the Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her father, she didn’tdespite his statements to the contrarycomprehend a word of the physics. It was her first recognition that love so often comes with imperfect understanding. The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time. Of her previous work, one reviewer stated, Raffel takes conventions and smashes them to bits” and another called it extreme literature.” Of Further Adventures, Publisher’s Weekly says, Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace.” Dawn Raffel is the author of a previous collection of short stories, In the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, NOON, Open City, The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, Unsaid, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She has taught creative writing in the MFA program at Columbia University and is a magazine editor in New York City. Readers have come to expect from Dawn Raffel’s prose nothing less than the syllable-by-syllable perfections of purest poetry and the boldest wisdom a human heart can hold. Her new collection of pithy, exquisite fictions about the timeless crises of mothers, daughters, and wives is breathtaking and haunting in its majestic exactitudes.” Gary Lutz Less has never been more than in Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. These spare, high-intensity stories of brave people at the end of their ropes are not only models of writerly integrity, but monuments of the spirit asserting itself out of the depths of silence.” David Gates

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe: Stories

United States

Dzanc Books

Elise, a young woman with a mysteriously ill son, returns to her childhood home years after running away with a lover. Now destitute, she begins to search for an object hidden somewhere in the house, which has been in a state of disrepair since her mother's untimely death. Her father, who fled political terror in in his youth, is frail and often dreaming. So it falls to Elise's older sister, who has never left home, to maintain family order. Unraveled by alcohol and her own longing for escape, "Aunt," as Elise's sister is simply known, is further disturbed by the child's illness and his mother's irresponsibility. To placate the child, she turns to the bedtime tale of the Three Little Pigs, which becomes increasingly corrupted with each telling. As Aunt struggles to take care of the child, she recalls -- with a mixture of jealousy and resentment -- the day her sister left home. Meanwhile, Elise continues her search, with consequences that will alter Aunt's life irrevocably.A writer of "obvious and extreme talent" (Los Angeles Times), Raffel uses starkly beautiful, stunningly precise language to etch this compelling portrait of a family torn apart by longing, miscommunication, and misdirected love. Meticulously crafted and utterly absorbing, Carrying The Body is ultimately about the inescapable emotional legacies passed from generation to generation, and our dreams of refuge and release.

Selected by O, The Oprah Magazine: * Best Memoirs * Best Beach Reads * Best First Lines * Top Books to Pick Up Now ** A Wall Street Journal Bestseller **
 MORE PRAISE FOR THE SECRET LIFE OF OBJECTS
 “Her gift for capturing the nugget of a relationship in a single backward glance works beautifully in this illustrated memoir.” – The Chicago Tribune
 “The Secret Life of Objects is a lean, brilliant, playful memoir.” – The San Francisco Chronicle
 “Her memoir reflects on everyday objects such as a cup, a ring… From these memories comes a whole life story.” – Reader’s Digest
 “A unique, evocative memoir…written with all the wild bloom of imagination that fiction brings to the table.” – The Quivering Pen
 “This endearing memoir takes an assortment of otherwise ordinary possessions and turns it into a series of delicate, resonant stories.” – More Magazine
 “’Sometimes things shatter,’ Dawn Raffel writes in The Secret Life of Objects. ‘More often they just fade.’ But in this evocative memoir, moments from the past do not fade—they breathe on the page, rendering a striking portrait of a woman through her connections to the people she’s loved, the places she been, what’s been lost, and what remains. In clear, beautiful prose, Raffel reveals the haunting qualities of the objects we gather, as well as the sustaining and elusive nature of memory itself.” – Samuel Ligon, author of Drift and Swerve: Stories
 “Dawn Raffel puts memories, people and secrets together like perfectly set gems in these shimmering stories, which are a delight to read. Every detail is exquisite, every character beautifully observed, and every object becomes sacred in her kind, capable hands. I savored every word. – Priscilla Warner, author of Learning to Breathe – My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life

The Secret Life of Objects

Arts & Literature

Jaded Ibis Press

The Secret Life of Objects: (color illustrated edition)

Dawn Raffel's Boundless as the Sky is a book of the invisible histories that repose beneath the cities we inhabit, and the worlds we try to build out of words. The first of its two parts, stories of real and invented cities, some ancient, some dystopian, is a response to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The second part comes together into one narrative, taking place in a single city-Chicago-on a single day in 1933. It is based closely on a true event, the arrival of a "roaring armada of goodwill" in the form of twenty-four seaplanes flown in a display of fascist power by Mussolini's wingman Italo Balbo to Chicago's "Century of Progress" World's Fair. The 7000-mile flight from Rome to Chicago was lauded by both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Hitler, at a time when aviation made banner headlines across the US, and news of the Nazis was often in a side column. The novella follows a few of the many thousands of Chicagoans there to witness the planes' arrival. These two panels of Raffel's poetic diptych call out to each other with a mysterious and disquieting harmony, and from history and fantasy to the dangers and dark realities of the current moment with startling insight and urgency.

Boundless as the Sky

Sagging Meniscus Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Raffel, Dawn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Raffel, Dawn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Raffel, Dawn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies

In The Year Of The Long Division: Stories

Carrying the Body: A Novel

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe: Stories

Carrying the Body: A Novel

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies

The Secret Life of Objects

The Secret Life of Objects: (color illustrated edition)

Boundless as the Sky