Kirjahaku

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction Amy Black, a queer single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out in the hills of Oakland, California, a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful illuminated manuscript she has ever seen, the Codex Argentus, hidden away in Q’s Library of Books That Don’t Exist-and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground. Amy’s curiosity becomes her salvation, as she’s drawn closer and closer to the secret societies and crackpot philosophers that haunt the city’s abandoned warehouses and defunct train depots. All of it leads to an opportunity of a lifetime: an artist’s residency deep in the holographic halls of Q headquarters. It’s a dream come true-so long as she follows Q’s rules.

When oral historian Ellen Margolis and her girlfriend decide to get married, Ellen realizes that she can't go through with a wedding until she tells her grandmother. There's only one problem: her grandmother is dead.As the two young women beat their own early path toward marriage equality, Ellen's longing to plumb that voluminous silence draws her into a clandestine entanglement with a wily Holocaust survivor--a woman with more to hide than tell--and a secret search for buried history. If there is to be a wedding Ellen must decide: How much do you need to share to be true to the one you love?Set in ebullient, 1990s Dot-com era San Francisco, Paper is White is a novel about the gravitational pull of the past and the words we must find to make ourselves whole.Hilary Zaid is an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the Tin House Writer's Workshop. Her short story "For Non-Speakers of the Mother Tongue" (Tahoma Literary Review, Winter 2017) has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and "The Dark Between the Stars" won the 2014 BLOOM Fiction Chapbook Prize. Hilary works as a freelance editor in Oakland, California.