Alta Journal is always excited to celebrate terrific new writing from the West, but when an acclaimed new collection comes from a member of our own team, we’re downright ecstatic. Anita Felicelli, editor of Alta’s award-winning California Book Club and author of Chimerica: A Novel and Love Songs for a Lost Continent, has released a new collection of stories, How We Know Our Time Travelers: Stories. Felicelli joins Alta Live to tell us about this exciting collection, reveal how she develops short fiction around themes as varied as major disasters and true love, and explain how she managed to turn the best of her extraordinary imagination into this deeply thoughtful collection of stories. Don’t miss our last Alta Live of 2024!

About the guest:

Anita Felicelli is the author of Chimerica: A Novel and the award-winning Love Songs for a Lost Continent. She edits Alta Journal’s California Book Club. Her short stories have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, The Normal School, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. She has contributed essays and literary criticism to the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Alta, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times (Modern Love), among other places. Her short stories and poems have been anthologized, and in 2023, one of her short stories was performed as part of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts. She served on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021–2024. Felicelli grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her family in Mountain View.

About the book:

How We Know Our Time Travelers: Stories is a dark, intellectual, and surreal collection inspired by the uncertainty of time that explores themes of technology, climate change, reality, love, and loss. Atmospheric, speculative stories examine our post-pandemic reality and future. Anita Felicelli introduces readers to a bickering couple who use an app to track their fights in “Keeping Score,” a woman who learns that an unseen lodger is in her home in “A Minor Disturbance,” a group of creepy friends who sell jars of fog in “The Fog Catchers,” and a woman who encounters a younger version of her own husband at her art exhibition in the title story. Time travel, as the book envisions it, happens all the time, if not in the way we’re used to considering it. Unsettling, uncanny, cerebral, and genre-bending, the book reminds us of the fragility and unreliability of memory and its invisible impact on the larger moments of our lives.

Here are some notable quotes from today’s event:

  • On how the collection began: “The collection began the way most of my collections or books do, with me sort of figuring out the writing and then figuring out what the preoccupation was from the writing. So I started writing these stories about environment and technology and time travel, starting probably around 2019 but increasing my efforts at the very start of the pandemic.”
  • On the book’s setting: “I was trying to make the descriptive details do extra work at an emotional level. Not only to conjure an image of the place but also to give you a feeling about what’s happening within the action and the dialogue of the story.”
  • On writing literary fiction: “I’m sort of an outlier within literary fiction right now in the sense that I feel a lot of freedom to write from the perspective that I want to write from. And I’m not thinking about ticking boxes, like I must have this character with this marginalization or this character with this other marginalization. I write from my experience in the world.”
  • On reader interpretations: “I would much rather have people have their own interpretations. I definitely include things that I know are ambiguities for the reason that I love ambiguous stories. I love being able to bring my own self into reading. And I think reading is really an act of communion between two minds.”

Check out these links to some of the topics brought up this week.