Sara Greenslit
Sara Greenslit won the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize for As If a Bird Flew By Me and the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction for The Blue of Her Body. She earned an MFA in poetryfrom Penn State and lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is a small-animal veterinarian.
As If a Bird Flew By Me: A Novel
Interview (2012)
Sara Greenslit spins a truly stunning, and often eerie, narrative from the careful cataloguing, seamless weaving, and inextricable interchange of music and language.
As If a Bird Flew By Me: A Novel
Sara Greenslit
2011
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-164-5
eBook
ISBN 978-1-57366-828-6
The world is full of continuous conversations: Now is surrounded by Past, and both are encircled by Forever.
So states an unnamed narrator in Sara Greenslit’s new novel As If a Bird Flew by Me.
Celia lives in the contemporary Midwest. Ann is an accused witch, executed during the Salem witch trials. Two women separated by time and place, yet yoked by heritage and history. Set in three time periods, stories within stories unfold, and Greenslit’s language seamlessly weaves Celia’s modern life with the historical record of Ann’s demise alongside dazzling renderings of animal life. Greenslit’s hybrid of fiction and nonfiction occupies that rarest of airs: it is a book that illuminates, line by line and page by page, how it should be read.
Birds, we learn from Sara Greenslit’s As If a Bird Flew By Me, have a mantra of migration, an internal logic, rhythm, and music, invisible yet moving. Like butterflies in a collection, the individual specimens that make up this book are each a song, and together a symphony.
In her brilliant lyric novel As If a Bird Flew By Me, author Sara Greenslit spins a truly stunning, and often eerie, narrative from the careful cataloguing, seamless weaving, and inextricable interchange of music and language.