Tag: Sara Majka

‘Reverón’s Dolls’ by Sara Majka

“Maybe ten or eleven years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city.”

So begins the first story of Sara Majka’s Cities I’ve Never Lived In, a story titled ‘Reverón’s Dolls.’ I love that first line for reasons I’m not quite articulate enough to capture in words — something about the chilly sense of narrative distance, something about how time is demarcated and gauzy for the narrator. These elements persist in the stories that follow, which are — most of them, anyway — linked. This story in particular follows our narrator — who, she admits, “wasn’t well in the way that [she] would be several years later” — and her recollecting an exhibit of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón she once went to see. Cities is Majka’s only book as of now, though she has published a number of terrific stories since the collection came out. Majka is a capital-M Master, and I return to these stories again and again, in awe of their wisdom, their beauty, their exquisite despair.

First published in Jerry, and collected in Majka’s collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In, A Public Space Book/Graywolf Press, 2016

‘Miniatures’ by Sara Majka

I return to Sara Majka’s collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In at least once a year for their isolated landscapes and beautifully distilled truths. Like Majka’s narrator, who links these stories together, I moved around frequently when I was growing up. Reading these stories helped me understand the way transience shapes a person’s interior life, as well as the way they inhabit a place. I could have picked any story from this collection, but I am drawn to ‘Miniatures’ because of the subtle way Majka depicts a relationship between two adult siblings whose wounds share the same origins, but present in different ways.

First published in Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Graywolf Press, 2016