The Audio Series: Alta Ifland

Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we are treated to two excerpts - one from The Snail's Song and one from Death-in-a-Box - as read by author Alta Ifland. 

Alta grew up in communist Romania and immigrated to the United States in 1991. After teaching French for many years, in 2004 she left academia and became a freelance writer and book reviewer. She is the author of two books of short stories: Elegy for a Fabulous World (Ninebark Press, 2009, finalist for the Northern California Book Award) and Death-in-a-Box (Subito Press, 2011, winner of the Subito Fiction Prize); and two collection of prose poems: Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice (Les Figues Press, 2007, bilingual, winner of the Louis Guillaume Prize) and The Snail’s Song (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011). She is currently at work on her third novel.

Click the soundcloud link below to experience Alta Ifland reading the two stories:

From The Snail's Song:

The word on The Snail's Song:

Poetry. With drawings by the author. "This SNAIL'S SONG is a refined encapsulation of all the beauty and sadness in the world; a true tour-de-force of imagination and sincerity."--Alex Epstein
*lifted from goodreads with love


From Death-in-a-Box:


The word on Death-in-a-Box:

Blending the fabulous with the macabre, the lyrical with the grotesque, the atemporal with the present, and melancholy with dark humor, these stories will take you from the ambiguous world of modern folktales where a man tries to catch Death in a box, to communist Eastern Europe where a man eats his own brains, to contemporary women who like garbage, or who prefer to keep their babies inside their bodies rather than give birth.
*lifted from goodreads with love