About
Anara Guard grew up in Chicago. Her short story collection, Remedies for Hunger, was named by Chicago Book Review as a Best Book of 2015. She received the John Crowe Ransom Poetry Prize from Kenyon College. Her work has been published in Gold Man Review, California Quarterly, The Ear, Twenty Twenty: 43 stories from a year like no other, and elsewhere. Like A Complete Unknown (2022) is her first novel.
Featured Work
Like A Complete Unknown
In 1969, a girl’s life is not her own. Katya Warshawsky’s parents demand she drop out of school to join a cleaning crew. She runs away instead—but Chicago's counterculture isn’t as welcoming as she dreamed. Starry-eyed, barefoot, and in trouble, she turns to widowed Dr. Lewis for help at his women’s clinic, then disappears again. The aging doctor’s rash impulse to save her could rejuvenate his melancholy life. While Katya hunts for freedom and Robert searches for her, they each encounter beauty and chaos as they brave the unknown. A compelling and evocative portrait that speaks to our own complex social times.
