From the Publisher
                   December 1997

"I'm always impaling myself on silver things, things my
lover gives me when I'm not looking. He buys me
silver rings and puts them on me when I'm asleep. He
buckles my waist with a silver belt, drapes me with
silver necklaces, fastens anklets under my jeans, puts six
earrings in the holes of my ears. Silver and
never gold, because silver is the color of the accident one
longs for. It's light that slants through rice paper
shades, a face on the street that carries you through the
solstice." 

So begins "Silver," one of the 27 stories in Thaisa Frank's
hauntingly beautiful new collection of short
fiction, Sleeping in Velvet. With prose as affecting as the
title is magnetic, Frank's words coalesce in a
consortium of stories best described as lovingly,
uncomfortably alluring. The stories in Sleeping in Velvet
are exceptionally real; one can feel the author herself
riding in the backseats of cars, hiding in closets, and
sitting in piercing parlors or rented houses on rainy
cigarette-smoke mornings with the characters she
creates. No one story is exceptionally talkative; rather,
the alignment of so many terse, color-packed
vignettes in such a way coaxes the reader to float in and
out of many lives, lives of distracted, sometimes
muddled, sometimes amorous people, and emerge bright yet
gray. The arrangement of these stories is not
unlike the cinematic technique whereby the camera follows
one person down a street until the lens
catches someone even more immediately enticing and does an
about-face to shadow them. For all these
characters, though, the environment overhead is the same.
It is life right now, in all its mismatched tragedy
and curiosity; it is you and I and the people you pass on a
given day, whose lives continue on down the
block just as yours does, waiting for the walk sign or in
other, intimate settings. Thaisa Frank's Sleeping in
Velvet does the literary about-face to follow passersby a
little further into privacy.