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Winner of the 2005 Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction
Diane Lefer is one of the most gifted and witty writers around and in California Transit she has used her remarkable talents and quite wonderful sense of humor to produce a most entertaining and interesting book. California Transit contains such a wide range of quirky events and rich characterizations that it is as memorable and satisfying as any fiction. In other words, grab this book—you will not be disappointed, for each of her stories is a well-told and compelling gem. —Oscar Hijuelos
Southern California: land of dislocation and assimilation. It is a place Diane Lefer knows well. In California Transit, she uses conversational prose and macabre wit to zero-in on a Mexican woman detained indefinitely by immigration officials, isolating her from her American family; or a zoo employee considering what to do with a euthanized antelope's head; or, in the title novella, a lonely woman, riding buses all day, who cannot avert the violence building within her. Chosen by Carole Maso as the winner of the 2005 Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction, this collection explores the difference between justice and law through a lens unfiltered by moralistic or didactic intention. Like a surveillance camera meant to record crime, not stop it, Lefer presents a world gone wrong, not because of people's hatred for one another but because of their impossible, unfulfilled yearning to connect.
Diane Lefer is the author of two previous collections, The Circles I Move In and Very Much Like Desire, and the novel, Radiant Hunger. She lives in Los Angeles where she is an artistic associate of Playwrights' Arena, volunteers with the Program for Torture Victims, and serves on the animal behavior observation team of the research department at the LA Zoo. Her ongoing collaboration with exiled Colombian theatre artist Hector Aristizábal encompasses works for the stage, street theatre, and social action workshops based on the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of the Union Institute & University.
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