Preview Orphan of the Moon
 
Andrea Clark Libin's new novella of prose poems, drawings, and collages, Orphan of the Moon—Notebook of a Girl in a Moscow Station, is a tale of survival, wary friendships, a longing for family and a search for a makeshift home that can hold childhood’s phantoms. The immediacy and lyricism of her writing is a gritty and resolute determination on how one survives in a world that has abandoned its diligence to humanity. To read this novella with its found-fragments and characters toughened by abandonment means walking through the sputtering lights of Moscow train tunnels in a state of makeshift prayer. “We are born children of blood, orphans of the moon.”
—Michelle Murphy, Wet Cement Press
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"Orphan of the Moon is a living, breathing, hybrid work unlike anything I've ever read—an orphan's notebook exhumed from the Moscow station and entrusted to your own red heart. An astonishing evocation of the subterranean universe of childhood, at once devastating and inspiring, a young girl's yearning for the world she's lost, for fresh strawberries, her birth name, and love; a fractured song of forgetting and remembering, and a testament to the death-defying power of art: 'dark spits at me, I spit back.' 'The station sanctuaries us,' writes Libin, and this book's broken-winged poetry did the same for me." —Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories (Knopf) and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
 
"How exhilarating to encounter a novella this spectacularly imaginative, with every page and collage adding new elements to the building complexity of this resonant story. Libin's lyrical text is as captivating as her collages, what a gorgeous, extraordinary book." —Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew (Penguin Books)
 
“Andrea Libin’s powerful writing in Orphan of the Moon has allowed her to achieve the near-impossible:  to create what can only be described as 'terrible beauty.'  The fraught tension, the bittersweet reflections, the absolute and often horrifying vividness of her protagonist’s difficult life, and even the monikers she attaches to her characters, all combine to create a truly haunting, menacing and mesmerizing story.” 
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, author of An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles (Grove Press)
 
"Andrea Libin's Orphan of the Moon pulls you into a fairy tale of poetic observations, vignettes, and images that make you want to sit on a beach and binge on the entire novella in one sitting. What struck me most is Libin’s ability to capture a world on one page, and make you feel like you're in on the secret. Think of this book as a talisman for the wondrous."
—Grace Murphy, Poet, Playwright & Screenwriter
 
Author Bio
Andrea Clark Libin’s work has appeared in Paris Lit Up Magazine, Poetry Northwest (prose & photography), Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetics, Kadir Has University’s Culture and Arts Journal (Istanbul), Zen Monster, and Downtown Brooklyn. Libin has taught at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, LIU Brooklyn, and Kadir Has University, Istanbul. Most recently, she has been facilitating workshops in Siem Reap, Cambodia, for children and teachers at an NGO village school and for the Women’s Resource Center. Born and raised in Manhattan, she currently divides her time between Brooklyn, Asia, and Europe. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program and is at work finishing a novel.