KL Pereira and Minna Zallman Proctor

Harvard Book Store welcomes writer, poet, and teacher KL PEREIRA and writer, critic, and translator MINNA ZALLMAN PROCTOR for a discussion of their books, A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality and Landslide: True Stories.

About A Dream Between Two Rivers

Both literary and speculative, both magically real and viscerally strange in the tradition of Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Jorge Luis Borges. In this collection, KL Pereira weaves elements of fairy tale, folklore, and myth into the lives of women, children, and immigrants. Her lucid prose underscores the tenacity of those who are most vulnerable, who live on edges between neat and clear definitions of who they are and who they want to be. Free of normative ideas of gender, class, race, and sexuality, Pereira explores rebirth amidst darkness.

About Landslide

Minna Zallman Proctor's Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These “true stories” explore the author’s complicated relationship with her mother―who was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty-seven and died fifteen years later―and the ways in which their connection was long the “prime mover” of Proctor’s life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of Proctor’s own life―shifting between America and Italy (and loving “being a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments”), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her “Jewish, not quite Jewish” mother.

Proctor has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite life’s mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. “Not having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory,” she writes. “[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin.” The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live.

Praise for A Dream Between Two Rivers

"A Dream Between Two Rivers is a precious gem all its own. Folk tales, experimental literature, speculative fiction, and mythology whether invented or neoclassical, all play together here gorgeously. The ghosts of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Donoso, Leonora Carrington, and Octavia Butler haunt this potent collection by an author of boundless imaginative gifts. Imagine a poet and painter in another dimension possessed by fever dreams and trying to tell our stories, and that will bring you only somewhere close to the magic of KL Pereira." —Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion and Sick

"Once this collection gripped me in its maw, it was impossible to put down and haunted my dreams for days after I was done reading. Each of Pereira's stories is stranger than the last and, through their explorations of identity, desire, and purpose, expose some deep truths about us as individuals. Lyrical, visceral, and taut, A Dream Between Two Rivers is a master work of a fever dream." —Lane Jacobson, Flyleaf Books

"KL Pereira's A Dream Between Two Rivers is a wonderfully dark, evocative, mischievous collection. Pereira expertly reinvents familiar favorites and prods at the boundaries of genre with a unique, eloquent voice. With wit and compassion, Pereira unflinchingly explores what it means to be human." —Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock

Praise for Landslide

“Landslide is that rare book that somehow succeeds in being both knowing and open-hearted, both formally sly and emotionally direct. Its timeless subjects―grief, storytelling, the giving up of childish things―are rendered in ways that are as movingly honest as they are probing and unfamiliar. A swift, compelling read.” ―Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone

"Minna Proctor's voice recalls Vivian Gornick and Rachel Cusk. I know of no one writing more bravely and acutely about the intricate bonds of family, and the ways that we wound and heal the ones closest to us. The reader is left craving more time in the narrator's calm, authoritative presence, which redeems the world even as she reveals its heartbreaking cruelty." ―Emily Gould, author of Friendship

"Landslide is candid, moving, and wholly original: The beauty of Proctor’s prose is matched by the depth of her insights into life and literature, love and loss." ―Rosie Schaap, author of Drinking With Men: A Memoir