“Enter the Town of Shadows, where noise is ‘the color of rain,’ and the self is a ‘hidden crowd.’ Indeed like shadows, the town's inhabitants are elusive—slipping in and out of mirrors, wandering down secret corridors of the mind, hiding in the spines of houses—and perpetually at risk of disappearing or being ‘deleted.’ Lindsay Stern's brilliant, urgent vignettes depict a people struggling to make sense of the limits of language and time. A dark and fascinating debut."
—Hanna Andrews, author of Slope Move
Lindsay Stern is the author of The Study of Animal Languages, described as a "warm, satisfying novel” (Forbes) that “tracks the breakdown of an academic couple’s marriage while dissecting differences between language and communication, knowledge and truth, madness and inspiration” (Publisher’s Weekly). Named one of Vanity Fair's Most Anticipated Books of 2019, it won a Lois Kahn Writers' Award and the Taylor-Chehak Prize in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Her first book, Town of Shadows, about a mender of carpets living in a dictatorship, was adapted into a dance by choreographers Brendan Duggan and Mallory Rosenthal. She has received a Watson Fellowship, an Amy Award, an Academy of American Poets' Prize, a MacMillan Fellowship from Yale University, where she received a PhD in Comparative Literature, and the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History for a forthcoming essay on two lost poems by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her cover story "The Divide", about a controversial experiment in the field of primatology, was nominated for a National Magazine Award by Smithsonian. She teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.
