About the Book
A truly Soft Skullian debut voice, Polek is for fans of Jen George's The Babysitter at Rest, Juliet Escoria's Juliet the Maniac, or Yukiko Motoya's The Lonesome Bodybuilder, as well as for readers who love the writing of Leonora Carrington, Diane Williams, May-Lan Tan, Noy Holland, Amelia Gray, or Angela Carter
Imaginary Museums is a collection of stories set in both the American Midwest and Eastern Europe. These stories explore weirdness and melancholy, wonderment and entrapment
Heartland Fall Forum appearance and ARC giveaway
Special focus on outreach in greater Washington, D.C., area, where the author is located
Lexile Measure: 980L Bookseller Praise for Imaginary Museums
In Imaginary Museums, we're never sure if we're peeking into a parallel universe or if our guide is simply sensitive enough to see the curiosities surrounding us. In these twenty-six minimalist stories, the reader has a bird's-eye view of characters whose irregular lives are matched only by the sangfroid with which they face the world. We meet Feebee, who builds trapdoors in her parents' house, an uncle in a wedding dress, and, in the title story, Annie, a divorcee who is attracted to a museum that is 'isolating and distant.' Readers who step into this imaginary museum will find it a crowded place, indeed, full of small dim corners and slivers of sunlight that illuminate mysteries dark and deep. --Cindy Pauldine, The River's End Bookstore (Oswego, NY)
I loved these weird short stories! They're so hard to describe, but even though each one is only a few pages long, they all go off into unexpected places, leaving you with a tiny surreal gem. For me it was a perfect mixture of strange minimalism, and these stories messed with my head long after I read them. Nicolette Polek is a writer I'll definitely be looking out for from now on. --Dan Schwartz, Changing Hands Bookstore (Phoenix, AZ)
These little stories are anything but little. It takes a skilled hand to fill each short story so completely . . . Some confusing, some bizarre, but all thought-provoking. A truly original book. --Julie Slavinsky, Warwick's (La Jolla, CA)
Striking in their surrealist beauty and surprising humor, the stories in Nicolette Polek's debut collection accrue meaning through sharp sensory detail, like lingering, half-remembered dreams. The experience is divine, and Polek navigates the negative space between plot to give us the pure nectar of storytelling. There is stunning imagery on display as well: strawberries are mashed into a sheep's coat; 'large expensive men bob [in a bath house] like corks, ' beside the sound of money being counted; the tension and energy of youth builds like dense dry undergrowth, tinder for a forest fire. Polek proves that it is all of us who are odd, after all. --Alex Helmintoller, DIESEL, A Bookstore (Santa Monica, CA)
Polek's stories draw the reader into a beautifully bizarre and imbalanced world, and with each story, the reader asks himself if he will continue, and the answer is always yes. --Don Luckham, The Toadstool Bookshop (Keene, NH)
Much like the surreal apartment in Polek's 'Invitation, ' Imaginary Museums is 'strange, but intuitive.' A little uncanny, often unsettling, yet oddly familiar--comfortable, even. These stories are rabbit holes, miniature gateways into worlds that feel very large, even (or especially) when you only get a glimpse at them. --Devon Dunn, Book Culture (New York, NY)
Each one of Nicolette Polek's Imaginary Museums is intricate and tightly woven. Polek's vignettes feature moments of critical disconnect, but they feel like beginnings or middles, with endings somewhere out of sight. Polek's voice is immersive, her confidence temporarily disguising the profound dislocation that her characters experience. A book much bigger than its page count, Imaginary Museums is an unsettling sampler of curiosities and crises. --Bridget McCarthy, Seminary Co-op Bookstore (Chicago, IL)
Polek delivers an unforgettable collection full of biting humor and provocative mundanities, much in the vein of Ramona Ausubel. A delight! --Allison Senecal, Old Firehouse Books (Fort Collins, CO)
These sentences zag when you expect them to zig. And don't get me started on the zigging. Trying to recount any of these stories will take way longer than it will to read them; they are masterworks of compression that unfold into sagas of falconers and an air-conditioning museum. But they also finish with tidy endings, landing the dismount from each impossible trick with a word, a gesture that somehow makes sense of the fantasia preceding. Oh, yeah: and it's really, really funny. --Benjy Caplan, Green Apple Books (San Francisco, CA)
"Did you ever see that diagram of a person's head, focusing on the brain, in which we were told about the 'attic' of the conscious mind and the 'basement' of the subconscious? I think we have a new name for that basement--Imaginary Museum. This delightful (disturbing?) group of vignettes lets us peek into the lives of a variety of strange characters that could only rise up from the depths of a vivid imagination. Anyone who likes 'different' and 'short' will love these pithy, thought-provoking flashes of literary perfection. Enjoy the vision!" --Linda Bond, Auntie's Bookstore (Spokane, WA)
"Reading Imaginary Museums feels like you're sitting on the morning train, chatting with the passengers beside you. Some conversations are longer than others, and some peers stand out from the crown with their absurdness. But above all, these characters and their stories are so human: strangers that you'd like to visit with again sometime soon." --Christine Rogers, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)
It's no small feat to establish a spellbinding presence in the span of twenty-six microstories, but Nicolette Polek pulls it off masterfully with Imaginary Museums. Her formula is so subtle that I can't really reason how she achieves these literary sleights of hand with such consistency . . . One part magical realism here, a dash of unadorned honesty there, stir in some gallows humor, and serve chilled. --Sam Faulkner, A Room of One's Own (Madison, WI)
I was drawn to Imaginary Museums due to its fantastic, ambiguous title, and it did not disappoint! These short-short stories are best taken like vitamin capsules for the imagination: two or three a day, let them soak into your mind and open your creative pores. One of my most anticipated early 2020 releases. --Fernando A. Flores, Malvern Books (Austin, TX) I have a confession to make: I love Soft Skull Press. I love them for books like Imaginary Museums, a collection of wonders and weirdness, of strangeness and surprises, of darkness and pure delight. As I read Polek's stories, I found myself turning to anyone nearby just to share a passage. Read and recommend this gem. --Tim Huggins, Brookline Booksmith (Brookline, MA)
This awesome little volume has worlds and worlds inside of it. Each story acts like an object caught by a strange trick of the light. With poetic language and unusual circumstances, Polek names the things we all know--like love, revenge, and melancholy--with a unique wit and alluring perspective. --Gwen Hunter, Solid State Books (Washington, D.C.)
Hysterical, vivid, ominous, fervid, outrageous, captivating: can one collection of short stories be all of these things? Once you read Imaginary Museums, you'll see the answer to this question is a resounding yes. Polek's collection is filled to the brim with unforgettable characters: pretentious academics, nervous brides, sneaky landlords--they're all here and then some. Imaginary Museums transports you to places that are wholly another world and yet also undeniably familiar. Short fiction is having a moment, and if you haven't delved into some of the great short fiction that's being published, a great place to start is with Nicolette Polek's masterful and engrossing work. --Morgan McComb, Square Books (Oxford, MS)
I am sometimes wary of literary forms that I have not studied thoroughly, fearful that I will miss something if I don't have a firm grasp on the limitations and potential of the format. I have read and enjoyed other collections of microstories, but I now understand that I was only seeing the limitations because I had not seen that form's potential more fully realized. But then Imaginary Museums. Nicolette Polek's collection is weird, vivid, revealing. Each story provides a glimpse of the world that is somewhere between a wry oddity and a parable. The profundity of the implicit metaphors varies, but that variance is the book's greatest strength: like unseen birds in the branches, it feels like the deeper meanings of the stories are considering you instead of vice versa. Imaginary Museums is never didactic, never obvious, and always wild. It reminds me most of a disorienting roller coaster from my youth that went back and forth through a loop and suspended riders at two vertical angles all in the space of thirty-five seconds. --Keith Mosman, Powell's Books (Portland, OR)
The curatorial eye of Nicolette Polek is appropriately scattered but searching, flitting between the concrete and impressionistic in clever pursuit of some deeper meaning to our ever-mounting frets and foibles. A lively arrangement of small-scale absurdities, Imaginary Museums proves to be as flustered, perturbed, and prone to distraction as its endlessly amusing subjects, each resonating with fractured enthusiasm for a world they are desperate to understand or, in lieu of that, abandon. An ideal collection for our inherently perplexing era. --Justin Walls, Powell's Books (Beaverton, OR)
"Surreal peepholes into slightly off-kilter examinations of what it means to be on display. You'll have to reread a couple of these a few times before you believe the strange journey they send you on: mediation via falcon, a house filled with grief, a sweater for a car. Brief, beguiling, and fun." --Luis Correa, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)
"Wildly innovative and strangely moving--I loved these offbeat tales! I laughed out loud so many times!" --Mary Cotton, Newtonville Books (Newton, MA)
About the Author :
Nicolette Polek is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a recipient of the 2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Review :
An American Booksellers Association Indie Next Selection
Polek's imagery comes through like flashes in a silent film. In one memorably vivid scene, a landlord shows a couple a video of herself as a child, smashing strawberries into sheep's wool. Another narrator's grandfather falls in love at 26 with a woman who loves flowers; one day he sneaks into her house to water all her plants. But he doesn't stop there, watering her quilt, her phone and her carpet. This may seem destructive, or cruel, but in Polek's world, it feels more like beauty. --Maya Chung, The New York Times Book Review
In Polek's deliciously unnerving debut, the mundane is made very strange, as everyday objects or normal people are considered in new and unsettling ways . . . A surprising and potent catalogue of small, eerie discoveries. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Rather than settling for one or two guiding themes, Polek offers an enjoyable balance of light and dark subject matter, sweet and bitter characters, cuddly and cruel moments . . . She has immense talent for sudden, quietly affecting turns of phrase, luminous details, and word choices that firmly pin images down . . . Some [stories] offer sharp social commentary, a bit like Diane Williams but with more warmth and vulnerability . . . A moving, impressively varied first collection. --Kirkus Reviews
When a foreign substance enters an oyster's shell, one of its organs generates the same material that the shell is made of to encase the foreign object, to protect itself. Or: when an oyster gets a splinter, it produces a pearl. This is what the stories in Nicolette Polek's debut collection, Imaginary Museums, remind me of. It's a world we recognize, but something is always very off . . . Something sinister is always lurking in each of these tightly-coiled, polished gems. --Katie Yee, Literary Hub, 1 of 12 Books You Should Read This Month
A collection of flash fiction that feels seemingly arbitrary with an ache of human longing for connection peppered in. A few of the stories are left with loose ends, so you can decide the outcome which feels like a 'choose your own adventure' in a way. These bizarre but beautiful stories transport you elsewhere with no intention of bringing you back. --Ashleah Gonzales, W magazine, Great Quarantine Reads
What lives on every page is the odd way Polek has of capturing the world with language . . . Polek writes, 'Perhaps if the mathematician infuses every mundane activity [such as opening a door] with stimulus, she could unlock the graying parts of her brain.' This collection feels a lot like that--the stories are the stimulus, and you are the mathematician--and perhaps in its enigma lies its virtue. --Erin Flanagan, Heavy Feather Review
A yearning lives under these stories . . . A slim volume of even slimmer stories that pack a quiet darkness, a silent wonder, and a grounded reality amidst beautiful absurdity. --Chelsea Sutton, The Adroit Journal
Delightfully different, Imaginary Museums still happens to hit upon the human urge for connection, acceptance, and a higher power. --Sophie Matthews, Women.com
Polek's stories are themselves trapdoors, to worlds that, though they feel like they could be our own, are separated to some degree by elements we might construe as strange in our everyday life. --Alex Jiménez, The Daily Californian
Imaginary Museums to me was like Michael Earl Craig combined with Lorrie Moore and Kafka and a nature documentary. --Tao Lin, The Believer
Trapdoors shine and exits shimmer in Nicolette Polek's debut collection of short stories Imaginary Museums . . . These stories are spare, but full and memorable . . . Polek helps us see, through a dark and mundane world, the strange, wavering light. We need that light. And now, maybe more than ever, it can be hard to make out. --Bella Bravo, Mask
These stories--more accurately categorized as flash fiction--are parable-like sketches, elegantly rendered, ranging from uncanny to mythical . . . Polek's stories are not without a sense of profound grace . . . The beauty of these stories rests in their simplicity and control. --Leah Rodriguez, Paperback Paris
Drawing attention to artifice can be a dangerous game, but in Polek's hands it is clear that the very awareness that threatens to ruin the spell of engaged reading is essential in understanding the characters within these stories, and why they act the way they do. In this collection--twenty-six short stories spread across four sections--attention is constantly being drawn to the performer in mid-action, fully aware of themselves as the observed, and reacting in interesting ways. This isn't The Ways of Seeing, although I'd bet that some of the characters have heavily thumbed copies resting on their bedside tables . . . Polek's work reminds me most of Edward Gorey's illustrations . . . While the confines of the drawings may seem imposingly small, the boundaries are adorned with dashed-off curlicues that only a master hand could perform. Polek has a similar ability to draw you into the miniature, to warmly welcome you into richly conceived micro-worlds. But as soon as you get too close, you're reminded: Look, don't touch. --Howie Waldstein, 12th Street
With composed brevity and a hip, off-brand optimism, Polek mines a bottomless crevasse of depressive inclinations and self-imposed disembodiment. From the depths, she yanks a lamp that is so lit it proves bright enough to reveal the reader's own isolations with insight, but isn't too hot as to burn the skin . . . Like Lydia Davis or Sabrina Orah Mark, Polek meditates on universal themes with the wry concision of short film, letting honest, specific images carry the burdensome philosophical weight. --Loie Rawding, Another Chicago Magazine
Nicolette Polek's stories are little circuses of wonder and surprise. They make me feel wide awake. Plus Imaginary Museums is really pleasingly full of stuff: you've got hairpin narrative turns, unexpected drownings, saltshakers, trapdoors, chain saws, vodka. In one of my favorite stories, a bluebird sees the main character, but she never sees the bird. Imaginary Museums is delightfully alive. --Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL
There's the sense that anything can happen in the stories of Imaginary Museums--a book full of surprising turns, fascinating characters, and perfect endings. The timelessness of Nicolette Polek's voice is a wonder, and it will stay with you long after reading. --Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else
What are these? Weird parables? Dark dreams? Warnings about the afterlife, death, marriage? Like the best writers, Polek is willing to go to a disturbing place and stay there. She will not save our hero. She will join the shadowy forces and lead us in. --Deb Olin Unferth, author of Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution
