Passages: Alta Ifland on Speaking to No. 4

Alta Ifland discusses the first pages of her latest novel, Speaking to No. 4, how she arranged the novel around six conversations that characterized her protagonist, bending our usual ideas about dialog to create scenes inside of scenes, and what it was like to publish a book ten years after she’d written it.

Ifland’s first pages can be found here.

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Alta Ifland was born and grew up in Communist Romania. She came to the US as a political refugee in 1991, has a PhD in French language and literature, and translates from/into Romanian, French and English. She is the author of four books of short fiction, including Elegy for a Fabulous World (2010 finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction) and Death-in-a-Box (2011 Subito Press Prize). Her collection of prose poems, Voix de glace/Voice of ice, which she has translated from French, won the 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize (a French prize), and her novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t, a satirical comedy about Moldovans versus Californians in a post-Communist world, came out in 2021.

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