Sometimes it seems that every book is marketed as a “love letter” to this or that city. In this novel by Polish author and art historian Agnieszka Taborska, newly translated by Ursula Phillips, the object of adoration is the small American city of Providence, Rhode Island, where Taborska has taught for decades.
But her interest is less in romantic odes and more in spirits and spectres; the novel takes the form of a winking, time-bending, faux-academic treatise on the life of a made-up historical figure, Phoebe Hicks, who starts a Spiritualism craze when a picture of her vomiting from bad clams goes the Victorian version of viral. Taborska’s playful interweaving of fact and fiction enlivens her central question: was Hicks, in some sense, the only real medium?
In a world of fakery and lies (but also real feminine transcendence), she may have been the only person who truly understood the sticky, provincial supernaturalness of her city. This book – atmospherically interspersed with collages by Selena Kimball – stays with you long after the seance is over.
- Available now from Twisted Spoon Press.
