Elana Greenfield is the author of the book At the Damascus Gate: Short Hallucinations (2003). Her play, Nine Come, is published in the anthology New Downtown Now from University of Minnesota Press, 2006. She lives in New York, where she teaches playwriting at Eugene Lang College, The New School.
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At the Damascus GateShort HallucinationsFrom"Possessed by A Demon: Two Tales of the Devil"
WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.
At the Damascus Gate:Short Hallucinations -
At the Damascus GateShort HallucinationsFrom"Neutrino Blues"
Delight was dressed as usual as a hypodermic. Her long legs in red stockings. In the aquarium in front of the glass she watched the Beluga whales. Next to her stood a man shorter than she with a red silk scarf around his neck. He swayed back and forth on his heels. The white whales turned sweetly and endlessly from back to stomach, interested only in up and down.
At the Damascus Gate:Short Hallucinations -
At the Damascus GateShort HallucinationsFrom"Desire"
ANGEL/STEWARDNESS: Ladies and gentlemen, we are air-borne. I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you once again to flight 003 to New York, and to remind you that the pilot has not as yet extinguished the seat belt or no-smoking signs. We would request that you refrain from smoking and moving about the aircraft until such time that the captain extinguishes the signs. I must request that all Muslims, genuflecting to the East on small rugs and all Jews swaying in front of any emergency exits, please try and act more like the Christians on board whom you will notice are sitting in their seats and quietly crossing themselves.
At the Damascus Gate:Short Hallucinations
"Elana Greenfield and the English language use each other beautifully. She makes little plays, stories long and short. The short ones, on another day, might have been poems. She is a lovely, lively writer." —Grace Paley
“In the work of Elana Greenfield, there is a mistrust of borders and boundaries that seems to extend to the medium of writing itself. While she is putatively a playwright, her work defies classification, occupying an indeterminate space between poetry, fiction, playwriting, and sub-genres like radio plays, oral storytelling and prose poetry. One could imagine her pieces making up a singularly enchanting evening of theater just as easily as one could imagine them as a collection of poems, to be enjoyed privately.” —Jason Grote, The Brooklyn Rail
“Work that is genuinely original is very difficult to describe. The blurbs for Elana Greenfield’s first collection of short plays, stories, and poems compare her to Borges, Kafka, Grace Paley, and Italo Calvino. While none of these is entirely wrong, they are most useful taken as a group, because they suggest a hard-to-pin-down sensibility that includes the preposterous and the homely in equal measure—along with fury and tenderness, keening sorrow and some of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read . . . As a satirist, Greenfield refuses to grant consolation; as a poet, she offers in her words again and again the consolations of beauty, pleasure, renewal, and faith.” —April Bernard, BOMB Magazine
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Powell's
- Barnes & Noble
- Alibris
- Abe Books