About
Diane Josefowicz is the author of L'Air du Temps (1985), a novella forthcoming from Regal House in 2024; Ready, Set, Oh, a novel published by Flexible Press and named a Shelf Magazine Notable Indie Book for 2022, and Guardians and Saints: Stories, forthcoming in 2025 from Cornerstone Press of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Dame, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. As a historian, she is also the author, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of two histories of Egyptology, The Riddle of the Rosetta (2020) and The Zodiac of Paris (2010), both from Princeton University Press. She serves as reviews editor at Necessary Fiction, associate fiction editor at West Trade Review, and as managing editor of The Victorian Web, the internet's oldest and largest site devoted to Victoriana. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BA from Brown University. She grew up outside Providence, where she now lives with her family.
Featured Work
L'Air du Temps (1985)
In 1985, the shooting of Mr. Marfeo disrupts the quiet suburban neighborhood of Maple Bay and prompts thirteen-year-old Zinnia Zompa to reorganize everything she knows about her parents—their preoccupations, obsessions, and above all, their battles with each other. As her understanding of the world grows, Zinnia sees how the violence she witnesses is part of a larger pattern of domination, one that shadows the world far beyond her neighborhood, and that coming of age means reckoning with this darkness.
Praise for L'Air du Temps (1985)
“It’s 1985, the MTV flag is on the moon, and Lincoln Continentals are triplicating in the New England suburb of Maple Bay, where everyone who’s not in jail or divorce court is going off the deep end. A vintage murder-mystery that’s evergreen as a chemically-treated lawn, this smart, tight novella is the arresting and singular cry of thirteen-year-old Zinnia Zompa, who’s troubling the shadows, swerving toward an awakening that might or might not be her ticket out of town.”
—Kirstin Allio, author of Buddhism for Western Children, winner of the Iowa Review Prize for Fiction
Other Works
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Ready, Set, Oh
2022
