Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth

I first heard of Deb Olin Unferth when my grad school professor, Victoria Redel, read us the awesome story “Deb Olin Unferth.” You can check out an animated reading here. I next encountered her work when her novel, Vacation, came out (she has a collection of short stories out, too–Minor Robberies–which I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading–it’s on my list). I loved Vacation, as evidenced by my extremely gushy post on it. When it came time to invite writers to contribute to Underwater New York‘s collaboration last year with Significant Objects, Deb was at the top of our list and, much to our delight, she said yes. She wrote a short-short called The Diplomat for us, based on a plastic flute we found during an excursion to Dead Horse Bay, and read it at our Bryant Park reading, as well as our appearance at Pratt Institute’s Writers Forum. All of this goes to show that Deb, like her writing, is awesome.

Her newest book is a memoir entitled Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Joined the War. It is about the year that she was eighteen and joined her boyfriend, George, in his Christian beliefs and desire to foment a revolution in Latin America.