Anne Raeff + Anthony Marra

Praise for The Jungle Around Us

“This masterful collection records the long psychic toll of the twentieth century’s traumas, offering portraits of people in various kinds of exile: displaced from their countries, or uneasy in their hometowns, or somehow alien in their own bodies and minds. Anne Raeff’s exquisite stories are remarkable for their combination of intimacy and reverence for the mysteries and private griefs her characters fold their lives around. Seldom have I read work so confident in the power of what’s left unspoken and in the deep eloquence of gesture. The Jungle Around Us is a haunting and breathtakingly beautiful book.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

“The stories in The Jungle Around Us do not try to make sense of the world–they are the world. A world of uncanny sharpness that is as bold as it is striking in its uncompromising, haunting depictions of longing and uncertainty and grief and bliss. The jungle Anne Raeff proposes us to enter is, in reality, not around us, in the intricated destinations of displacement where this book takes place–from Bolivia to Austria, from Leningrad to Albuquerque, from Harlem to El Tambor–but within ourselves. The protagonists in these stories are commanded by loss and desire and uprootedness and the scalding need for human connection, but unlike those from any other work of fiction that might be too self-conscious of its own ambitions, they struggle handling these emotions. Raeff’s characters are too complex, too fully fleshed out, too human to know what step to take next, and this is, perhaps, the biggest feat of many she has achieved with this ravishing collection. Her talent is rare and transfixing, and this book marks the arrival of a marvelous new voice.” —Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of Barefoot Dogs

While struggling with fear, danger, and displacement, the characters of “The Jungle around Us” form strange and powerful bonds in distant and unlikely places. A family that has escaped Vienna ends up on the edge of the Amazon, where the parents fight yellow fever and the daughter falls in love with a village boy. Two sisters learn lessons about race and war during the Columbia University riots of1968. A young girl confronts death when her former babysitter is mysteriously murdered. In Paraguay, two adult sisters confront their loneliness while their precocious young charge faces off with a monkey. Raeff’s stories are about embracing the world though the world contains everything we fear.

Anne Raeff is a high school teacher at East Palo Alto Academy, where she teaches English and history. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica, among others. Her first novel is Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia.

Anthony Marra is the New York Times-bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award.