Venus in the Afternoon

TEHILA LIEBERMAN has won the Stanley Elkin Memorial Prize and the Rick Dimarinis Short Fiction Prize and her fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Nimrod, the Colorado Review, Salamander, and Cutthroat. Her nonfiction has been published in Salon.com and in Travelers' Tales Guides anthologies, including Best Women's Travel Writing 2007. Originally from New York, she lived in Jerusalem before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she consults as a writing coach for Harvard Business School.

"Quiet, moving, masterfully crafted. Such are the nine stories in Venus in the Afternoon. Tehila Lieberman writes with precision, restraint, with a compassionate heart. She inhabits her characters, young or old, men or women, honestly, but without judgment, until they rise off the page and stand before us breathing and alive. New York, the Atacama desert, Amsterdam or Cuzco in Peru, the settings in Venus in the Afternoon are just as varied as the lives which they contain. A wonderful collection, one that will stay in your mind long after you have bid it goodbye." -Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West and judge|"Having taught college students many contemporary short stories, I can attest to the power of this collection: Tehila Lieberman's extraordinary use of language I get lost in, her words that stir my senses ... 'the smell of honeysuckle in the untended gardens that offer up flowers, voluptuous, bursting, grass that reaches, snake-like, upward, weaving quietly between people's quarrels and midday naps.' ('Into the Atacama'). These stories are to be read with pleasure, with awe."-Carol Dine, author of Van Gogh in Poems