Xoxox Press, a small press publisher in Gambier, Ohio, has issued a novella by Michelle Auerbach, titled Alice Modern.

Book Cover for novella, Alice Modern, a novel by Michelle Auerbach

Modernist poet H.D. and her lover, Winifred Ellerman (known as Bryher), are central protagonists in a graceful, erotically lush novella of 1930s Europe. Young Alice Modern tells the tale of leaving her bourgeois Jewish home in Vienna to work as a nanny in the household of H.D. and Bryher, caring for their young child Perdita. Entranced by the keen literary lives of “Kat” and “Gryphon” in Switzerland, Alice begins to transcend her tightly-bound life and discover who she is and might become. Her world opens and her sexuality awakens in a time of political turmoil and existential hazard, reckoning with her own inner storms and the approaching flames of fascism and holocaust.

“This taut, handsome tale brings the gone world so gleamingly to life you could imagine it was all happening just yesterday or earlier today or even tomorrow. Not only does Auerbach write excellent sentences, she deploys them with great care and craft to build a gripping tale of war, love, friendship, and the deep wells of the mind.” — Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome and Kind One