Faculty Member Melanie Rae Thon Publishes New Book, Four Ebooks

Silence & Song is Thon's most experimental work; a diptych, two long lyric fictions hinged by a short prose poem. Inspired and informed by biology, physics, music, history, intimate violence, and miraculous resilience, all three pieces move from mourning to song. The primary speakers in these fictions contemplate human and environmental fragility, but are also besieged by evidence of infinite creative abundance: the eggs of shrimp that lie dormant for decades, the sophisticated symbolic language of honeybees, the ability of the creosote to live 10,000 years, the astonishing resurgence of wildlife in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 

Fourteen excerpts from this work have been published in or accepted for literary journals. The complete book will be published by University of Alabama Press / FC2.

Thon also recently re-released four of her previous works as ebooks. Readers can now find First, Body; Meteors in August; Sweet Hearts; and Iona Moon on Open Road Media. Two other works, In This Light and The Voice of the River are available in print as well as digitally.

Thon's writing has been published in The Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Conjunctions, Tin House, and the Paris Review. She is a recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Reading the West Book Award, and the Gina Berriault Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Tanner Humanities Center. She has also been a writer in residence at the Lannan Foundation.