TARA DEAL
2016 NOVELLA PRIZE SELECTED BY MARGARET LUONGO
2016. ISBN 978-188116-360-2
$15.00 Bookshop | Amazon | Pathway
Part futuristic fiction and part meditative memoir, That Night Alive begins on the narrator’s death date and moves backward in time to tell her story. She traces her path as a successful crypto-reporter, navigating a life of secrecy and solitude and world travel. A counter-narrative intersects, told by the same woman as a young artist struggling to create a work of beauty. That Night Alive investigates art and failure, persistence and success.
Reviews & Such
- “a futuristic, contemplative meditation on the transitory nature of life, the suffocation induced by a world under surveillance, and the eternal struggle to funnel creative expression into a work that will live long after its creator.” –
Heavy Feather Review, May 2017.
- completely riveting from first page to last. – Midwest Book Review, November 2016.
- A microreview of That Night Alive appeared in Nerds of a Feather Flock Together in October 2016: “The novella reads as a perfect amalgamation of poetry and prose.”
- a tightly written and successful novella.– Melissa Reddish, Small Press Book Review, September 2016.
- Beautifully paced, That Night Alive records a woman’s yearning to make something lasting in a post-apocalyptic world of surveillance and subterfuge where genuine art is forbidden. Tara Deal’s ambitious, inventive, continually surprising, and finely etched novella immerses us in a woman’s struggles and rewards the most close and attentive reading.
—Lee Upton
- In Tara Deal’s That Night Alive moments as vivid and complex as any actually lived weave a narrative of compelling intimacy. Unexpected images ask to be unpacked, considered, and remembered. The narrative plays with time in a language that provokes curiosity as we progress into the text and its world.
—Andrew Davison
About the Author
Tara Deal is a writer in New York City. Her previous novella, Palms Are Not Trees After All, won the 2007 novella prize from Texas Review Press. Her shortest story can be found in Hint Fiction (Norton).
