An actress of sorts, a woman recalls her childhood, longs for her absent lover, imagines traveling overseas, and wanders through gardens and galleries of art. Hers is a life meticulously lived, a carefully crafted and rehearsed engagement with a real and imagined world; a search for love and meaning that has left her, in the end, alone.

Unrue’s intricate and intriguing sentences — now one word, now comprising whole paragraphs and interrupting one another — manage to fuse detachment and emotion, heartbreak and humor.

Jane Unrue’s novella The House was published by Burning Deck in 2000; her collection Atlassed was published by Triple Press in 2005; the novella “Dear Mr. Erker” appeared in the final edition of 3rd bed. Jane Unrue, born in Nevada, now lives in Boston and teaches at Harvard.

“Quietly plumbing the intimacies of architecture, landscape, and domesticity, Jane Unrue's debut, The House, develops a muted intensity through serial blocks of meditative prose… the book accrue[s] a subtly disarming power as the speaker investigates her domestic environment from a wide array of perspectives, including the intergalactic…. Displaying the influence of writers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Bachelard, Charles Olson and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Unrue successfully forges an evocative approach that could be seen as metacubist in its dizzying, varied takes of the familiar world.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Unrue brings the veil of language between the reader and the illusion of realism, suggesting dark and frightening possibilities beyond our ken that are at the same time exhilarating… [Atlassed is] both a mapping and an erotics of the body…. In the end, its alchemic blend of imminent horror with immanent revelation and its apocalyptic mixture of mystery and desire, create a dark and evocative beauty that is both enigmatic and enlightening.”

—Gunnar Benediktsson, The Diagram