Doll's Alphabet

Camilla Grudova lives in Toronto. She holds a degree in art history and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in the White Review and Granta.

Praise for The Doll's AlphabetFinalist for the Shirley Jackson Award in the Single-Author Collection categoryFinalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award“The world [The Doll’s Alphabet] inhabits—droll, inexplicable and even beautiful in its slovenly fashion—is unlike any other I’ve encountered.” —The Wall Street Journal“That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams.” —The Guardian“Grudova’s method of storytelling is highly imaginative and incredibly ambitious.” —Chicago Review of Books“The Doll’s Alphabet is a dark, yet naive, body of work dripping with eccentricity and weirdness.” —CBC“Grudova does mermaids and magic, but she also does moldy, dingy, scratch-and-sniff interiors that reek of cabbage and old shoes. . . . Grudova’s descriptions are crooked and revelatory.” —Harper’s Magazine“Grudova is a master of world-building with an incredible command of language.” —The Herald“A singular collection from a unique talent, stories with the force of dreams, a reading experience from which you may never awaken.” —The National Post“If fairytales could dream, this nightmarish collection is what you might end up with. . . . Grudova very efficiently spins us into her weird web.” —The Times Literary Supplement“The stories included in [Grudova’s] debut collection [The] Doll’s Alphabet are at once macabre and wondrous. . . . Grudova’s imagination is among the most potent to emerge in literature in recent memory.” —Entropy“Just when we feel we have escaped the familiar for the fantastical, an event or a detail pulls us back. The resulting picture is one of a society determined by structures as opaque and incredulous as our own.” —TANK“[Grudova’s] writing is haunting and humorous, and the attention to gender dynamics adds a layer of truth to these dark tales.” —NewPages“These stories draw on images and myths you know—mermaids, werewolves, children’s dolls—but they’ve been reinvented with darker, dreamier twists.” —MPR“Camilla Grudova’s debut short story collection, splits open a dollhouse of domestic life and allows us to examine the magical dystopian interior.” —Arkansas International“Camilla Grudova’s collection will appeal to anyone who loves weirdness with a message.” —Bustle“Grudova’s beguiling collection of short stories—filled with mermaids and werewolves—announces the arrival of a major new voice in Canadian fiction.” —Globe and Mail“This doll’s eye view is a total delight and surveys a world awash with shadowy wit and exquisite collisions of beauty and the grotesque.” —Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird“Down to its most particular details, The Doll’s Alphabet creates an individual world—a landscape I have never encountered before, which now feels like it was waiting to be captured, and waiting to captivate, all along.” —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?“Marvellous. Grudova understands that the best writing has to pull off the hardest aesthetic trick—it has to be both memorable and fleeting.” —Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk