Gazelle

About the Book

Five of my narrating voices are male, middle aged to elderly. Their accents vary—an East Coast American professor in “Driving,” “Oxbridge” is British with a tinge of Irish in “Hippo Club,” “Mose Konen,” and “The Man in the Apple-Green Tie.” And for the narrator of “Ostraneni,” the reader may imagine the dialect of a member of the elite of ancient fifth century BC Athens. Four of these monologues are in a female voice: the elderly woman’s aggressive/defensive voice of “Gazelle” came to me in a dream shortly after I had moved to New York City to live in the early 1980s, the naive voice of a Midwestern girl recounts a childhood trauma in “Snakedoctors,” a subdued young woman tells of her relationship to her parents in “At the Lake House,” and Bronze Age Greek accents of Ismene—the lonely, hysteric, forgotten princess of Thebes and sister to Antigone—in the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles, again, invite imagination. That is how I hear them.

About the Author

Alison Armstrong’s long involvement with Anglo-Irish literature has resulted in varied publications, including two books, The Joyce of Cooking: Food & Drink from James Joyce’s Dublin (Station Hill Press, 1986), and “The Herne’s Egg” by W.B. Yeats: The Manuscript Materials (Cornell University Press, 1993). Her essays, short fiction, poetry, and reviews have appeared in various publications including American Arts Quarterly, BOMB, Exquisite Corpse, Notre Dame Review, and PN Review. Her memberships include Japanese Artists Association, The James Joyce Society and W.B. Yeats Society in New York, and Artists Without Walls. After travel and study in Ireland and England, she returned to America as an editor at The Kenyon Review before settling in Manhattan, where she has been teaching writing and literature at NYU, the Cooper Union, and School of Visual Arts. She lives in the historic Westbeth Artist Housing community in Greenwich Village.