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The Snail's Song by Alta Ifland
with drawings by the author

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Alta Ifland’s short stories work from the energy of defamiliarization, as some of the best pieces
of literature do.  Her language is sweet, chatty and seductive, and when a reader gets comfortably
situated in her world, like a mouse in cheese, she catapults her or him into another, ‘dangerously’
different perspective.  The world of Ifland’s stories is made of opposites: it’s warm and chilly, deeply
humane and strangely absurd, gentle and rough, humorous and sad.”
      Dubravka Ugresic on Elegy for a Fabulous World

Alta Ifland's uncanny tales merge the child's innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth.
A gone world prospers in the real time of memory, its immediacies restored, its deeper significance
coming clear like a shape disclosed by the archeologist's pick.  
     Sven Birkerts on Elegy for a Fabulous World

In the fabulous world elegized by Alta Ifland, what is usually understood by living or being is nothing more
than a series of moments in anyone's life, harvested by consciousness and recreated by memory.  […] the
stories in Elegy for a Fabulous World are remarkable: intriguing, quirky, bizarre, terse, never boring and always
profoundly humane and human.
     2010 Northern California Book Awards Jury

In most of the stories in this wonderfully disorienting collection, [Ifland] demonstrates a fabulist take that
allows only precarious footing in the quotidian.                               
     Peter Grandbois, Rain Taxi, on Death-in-a-Box