Authors · The gallery
Layout · the gallery
Jane A. Doe
Houses that keep a weather of their own, and the women who notice first.
Cincinnati, Ohio · A river town in the Ohio Valley
Layout sample. Not an author on the record, and not a title the house is offering. Use this page to judge the room, not the books.
No. S04 · Novel
Salt on the Sill
The house was ordinary. The precaution was not.
She salts the windows every night. She will not say what she is keeping out.
No. S05 · Novella
The Upstairs Window
Everyone agreed there was no upstairs. The curtain moved anyway.
The house has one story. The window is on the second.
No. S06 · Stories
Kitchen Saints
A place at the table is a kind of record.
Six stories about guests who were fed, and what the kitchen kept afterward.
Colophon
Jane A. Doe is not a writer on the Fiendish list. She is the second layout, built so a page can lead with the books instead of the biography. Nothing under her name is a real title.
The shape she is standing in for writes short novels about ordinary rooms that will not stay ordinary: a sill salted against something nobody will name, a window that belongs to a floor the house does not have, a kitchen that remembers a guest the family has agreed to forget.
Her page is a gallery. Each book is a poster. The life is a colophon at the end, not the front door. John Q. Public has the ledger. Richard Roe has On the record.
Essay · specimen
The Extra Plate
My grandmother set one more place than there were people. She called it habit. Habit does not polish a fork that nobody is going to use. I was grown before I asked whose habit it had been first.