The Calamity
of  Desire
and Other Stories

A debut collection of short fiction by Pushcart-Prize nominated author Judith Dancoff

"This gorgeous collection brings to life Foucault's dictum that meaning requires the viewer's inclusion. Readers are folded into classic artworks, transported across time and space. Art lovers, history buffs, storytellers—read this magical book!"

— Nan Cuba, author of Body and Bread, winner of the PEN Southwest Award.

"In Judith Dancoff's radiant stories, painterly subjects become narrators, celebrated figures are saturated with sinister shadow, and the artist becomes a canvas on which the process of art-making makes its transformative mark. The Calamity of Desire is both timeless and quietly subversive: an essential for any art lover, artist, lover, human."

— Juli Min, author of Shanghailanders

"Skilled critics help us understand art in its historical context. In these luminous stories, we experience the rest of that world—through families, through chance encounters, through desire—and are utterly changed."

— Diane Smith, author of Letters from Yellowstone and Pictures from an Expedition, and judge, the L.A. Times Festival of Books

Release date: March 2024
Finishing Line Press

Book Audio Sample

A debut collection of short fiction by Pushcart-Prize nominated author Judith Dancoff

Spanning the Roman era to the present day, Dancoff's elegant short fictions weave famous works of art with sometimes real, sometimes fictional artists and protagonists, in stories told from the female gaze, and against the backdrop of the life and death conflicts that surround them. Described as "luminous" by Los Angeles Times Festival of Books judge Diane Smith, Dancoff's vivid, lyrical prose explores the intersection of history, ambition, heartbreak, and desire, to illuminate the human heart.

Judith Dancoff's writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Shanghai Literary Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Her awards include a 2021 Pushcart nomination and residencies at Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where she was the McElwee Family Fellow.