Fiercely funny and entirely original, this debut collection of stories takes readers from the United States to Israel and back again to examine the mystifying reaches of our own minds and hearts.

The characters of The Worlds We Think We Know are animated by forces at once passionate and perplexing. At a city zoo, a mismatched couple unite by releasing rare birds. After being mugged in the streets of New York, a professor must repeat the crime to recover his memory―and his lost love. In Tel Aviv, a sandstorm rages to expose old sorrows and fears as far away as Ohio. And from an unnamed Eastern European country, a woman haunts the husband who left her behind for a new life in America.

In Dalia Rosenfeld's prose, the foreign becomes familiar and the mundane magical. The Worlds We Think We Know is a dazzling debut―clear-eyed, empathetic, and heartbreaking.

 

Dalia Rosenfeld is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in publications including the Atlantic, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and Colorado Review. She teaches creative writing at Bar Ilan University and lives with her three children in Tel Aviv.

 

“A profound debut from a writer of great talent.”―Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son

“I’ve read Dalia Rosenfeld’s stories with huge admiration: the tone, the perfectly balanced control of every sentence in the space made for it by the sentence before, the quiet implicitness of every gesture, the scenes so well observed that they seem like indelible steel engravings, and especially, whole lives subliminally yet substantively limned by a phrase or two. Flying beyond what we are used to calling ‘conventional realism,’ Rosenfeld points to a shimmering spot just beyond the horizon, and leaves us yearning. Is there a name for what she does? To find out, I think one must consult Borges. Or Italo Calvino. Or little fragments of Sebald.”―Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies

“The Worlds We Think We Know is a gorgeous and wise collection of stories filled with deeply human and unforgettable characters. Dalia Rosenfeld is a profoundly gifted and compassionate writer, and this is an extraordinary debut.”―Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

“Dalia Rosenfeld is very funny, Jewish, and wise.”―Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

“A wondrous collection, rich with melancholy humor and insight. Dalia Rosenfeld’s stories will go on glimmering in your mind long after you’ve read them.”―Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl