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About The Invention of Ana:
With the infectious narration of Nick Hornby and the vibrant lyricism of Junot Díaz, this breathtaking debut brimming with youthful brio chronicles a young man’s friendship with a most peculiar artist.
On a rooftop in Brooklyn one spring night, a young intern and would-be writer, newly arrived from Copenhagen, meets the intriguing artist and mathematician Ana Ivan. Clever and funny, with an air of mystery and melancholia, Ana is living like a prime number: fierce and unbroken and divisible only by herself. She is also bad luck, she confesses; she is from a cursed Romanian lineage.
Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana’s enthralling stories–of her unlucky countrymen, of her parents’ romance during the worst years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, of a daylight savings transition gone horribly wrong. Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor: following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time–an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month.
Descending into the blackness with Ana, the intern slowly loses touch with his own existence, entangling himself in the lives of Ana; her starry-eyed mother, Maria; and her obsessive math-prodigy father, Ciprian. Peeling back the layers of Ana’s past, he eventually discovers the perverse tragedy that has haunted her family for decades and has shaped her journey from the streets of Bucharest to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and finally to New York City.
The Invention of Ana blurs the lines between narrative and memory, perception and reality, identity and authenticity. In his stunning debut novel, Mikkel Rosengaard illuminates the profound power of stories to alter the world around us–and the lives of the ones we love.
About Come West and See:
Come West and See is a work both timely and timeless. Set in the Redoubt, an isolated triangle of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming where an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge escalates into a separatist uprising, these stories explore the loneliness, insecurity, and frustration inherent to love and heartbreak. A lakeside wedding drunkenly devolves into a cruel charade; an unemployed carpenter joins a militia after his wife leaves him; and a former soldier raises the daughter of a dead comrade in a bunker beneath an abandoned farm. Come West and See explores divisions both personal and political, offering startling insights into the wounds of the American people and a powerful new vision of the West.
Mikkel Rosengaard’s first novel, The Invention of Ana, has been published in five languages. He is a two-time recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Literary Fellowship, and his work has appeared in the Architectural Review, PBS’s Art21, Hyperallergic, and many other publications. He grew up in Elsinore, Denmark, and lives in New York City.
A graduate of New York University’s MFA program, Maxim Loskutoff has been honored with the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Global Writing Fellowship in Abu Dhabi, and the M Literary Fellowship in Bangalore. He lives in western Montana.
