VISITATION STREET

A gritty urban drama, an expression of contemporary New York, and a character-driven story about the many—sometimes torturous—forms of redemption. Like with Richard Price and Zadie Smith, the physical and emotional landscape of the setting in Visitation Street is indelible. The richness of Dutch Basin is layered by the ways we look at it: through the eyes and with the voices of a cast of characters as diverse, as real, and as challenging as in any contemporary fiction today.

Summer in Dutch Basin, Brooklyn, a blue collar dockside neighborhood where the East River opens into the bay. The nice streets are the streets that have trees. The bar called the Dockyard is not trying to be ironic. June and Val, two fifteen-year-old students at Our Lady of Visitation, are looking for fun. June, full-figured and aware of it, wants to find a party, but Val, sensing the last summer they'll have for simpler pleasures, convinces her friend to take the raft out onto the bay to see what they can see. Forget the boys, the bottles, the coded whistles. Out on the bay, the girls see the Manhattan skyline. “That’s where we belong,” June says. “That’s the place for us.” She raises her arms and snaps her fingers. She dips and rolls her shoulders. “No more wasting time.” And then they disappear into the darkness. Only Val will survive that night, washed ashore semi-conscious in the weeds. What exactly happened to June that night has reverberations for everyone in Dutch Basin: The investigation gives Fadi, the Lebanese bodega owner, a sense of belonging as he prints his neighborhood newsletter; the crime threatens to upend Cree's life, just as he tries to pull it together after his father's murder; and the emergence of Val from under her missing friend's shadow will tempt Jonathan, an alcoholic music teacher, out from under the barstool and into the starkness of hard truth. Ivy Pochoda is the author of the novel The Art of Disappearing, which was published in 2009 by St. Martin’s Press to excellent reviews. Her short fiction has appeared in H.O.W. Journal and Canteen and she has contributed to The Rumpus and the Huffington Post book section. Her nonfiction articles have appeared in Fantastic Man, Time Out New York, House & Garden, Maxim, Minx, and BABY. She has a BA from Harvard University in English and Classical Greek with a focus on dramatic literature and a MFA from Bennington College in fiction. She is a former professional squash player.