The School of Mirrors on Storytime in Paris/ Paris Underground Radio.
Canadian Paperback
From January 24, 2022, The School of Mirrors ia available in paperback in Canada.
From Hazlitt Magazine
‘Silence We Inherit and Carry With Us’: An Interview with Eva Stachniak
The author of The School of Mirrors on sexual violence, the history of midwifery, and opening up archival silences.
The New York Times recommends The School of Mirrors as “one of the books that promise to bring your summer alive.”
On the Power and Purpose of Historical fiction;
Conversation between Eva Stachniak and Christina Baker Kline “about history, facts, truth, interpretation, and how our writing about the past informs and comments upon the present”
CBK: Both of us write fiction set in the past that reflects, or illuminates, or comments upon, life in the present day. How did you come to write about the past, and what does your writing say about the world we live in today?
ES: I was born in Poland and the women who raised me never stopped talking about the big historical upheavals they lived through. As a child, I quickly calculated: to be a grandmother I have to live through two World Wars, to be a mother, through one World War and one Nazi occupation.
I never forgot that I was raised in what historian Timothy Snyder aptly called “the Bloodlands of Europe”: Hitler’s and Stalin’s killing fields. How could I? War ruins were around me. Everyone I knew talked about loss and displacement. Borders had shifted. Part of Poland became Soviet Russia, part of Germany became Poland. All this irrevocably shaped my parents’ lives and mine.
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MORE at LITERARY HUB
A reflection on how the memories of war linger in families:
Polish Language Site