Publisher Description

Small Pieces is a collaboration between novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom and writer and visual artist Fowzia Karimi, pairing Marcom's short stories—miniatures as Marcom calls them—with Karimi's watercolors. The work is a conversation between two artists in text and image, side by side.

Author Biography

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of seven novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists' Foundation. She was a 2022 finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.Fowzia Karimi has a background in Visual Arts and Biology. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, California. Her work explores the correspondence on the page between the written and the visual arts. She is a recipient of The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards (2011). She is the author of Above Us the Milky Way  (Deep Vellum, 2020). She lives in Texas.

Long Description

Small Pieces is a collaboration between novelist, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and writer and visual artist Fowzia Karimi, pairing Marcom's short stories, or "miniatures" as Marcom calls them--prose pieces of one page or less--with watercolors done by Karimi. The work is a conversation between two artists in text and image, side by side.

Excerpt from Book

Misericordia Is a Virtue As Long as It Doesn't Fall Merely Into Passive Sentiment orSentimentality The lobsters lie piled one atop the other in the aquarium at the supermarket wherefor $12.99 a pound you can buy a fresh! one for your dinner. Thick red and yellowrubber-bands clamp the crustaceans' front claws together restricting, thereby, theirmobility. Those of the uppermost animal layer lurch hurly-burly across an agitatedlandscape, while the lowest tiers of the living or dying lie mostly immobile in theirown handicapped state. I stopped for a moment to admire what I might eat at somefuture hour and I noticed the colorful rubber-bands, the massive hobbled frontclaws, the strata of light-brown bodies, the jerky movements of two walkers as theypitched toward the glass and away, each animal an unholy merchandise available atthe supermarket from 7 in the morning until 11 at night three miles from where Ilive, one hundred and eighty-seven miles from the sea.

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