Fearcatcher
Description
In a small village in Soviet Armenia, a baby girl is found abandoned in the woods, with one hand forced out of her swaddle. All her life Ruzan Garsevanian will wonder what she was reaching for the night the fearcatcher’s husband found her and took her home to his mysterious wife. The fearcatcher is a woman at once at the center of her community and at the very outskirts of it. To men, she is a threat to their traditional Armenian way of living; to women, she is the answer to all of their fears. For the daughter she has adopted, she is the woman Ruzan can never truly know.
Trained by Ripsimeh in the ways of fearcatching, as she grows, Ruzan yearns for freedom: from the hypocrisy and insularity of her village, and from the hand of destiny her mother swears will eventually take Ruzan in its grasp—for when a fearcatcher dies, a fearcatcher is born. In the capital city of Yerevan, where revolution brews, Ruzan is determined to carve out a life on her own terms. But when disaster threatens the lives of both the family she has left behind and the family she has newly begun, Ruzan must decide whether she will become unknowable to her own daughter, too.
Lush and mythic yet profoundly intimate, Naira Kuzmich’s posthumous debut novel is a journey through perpetual questions of fear and of fate.
Reviews
"Naira Kuzmich is the rare writer whose technical mastery and ineffable magic soar together on the page to create works that are unforgettable. In this superb novel, Kuzmich deftly weaves an epic story of what holds together family and identity, the boundless ways we both run from and toward the ones we love. Fearcatcher is a new cornerstone of Armenian-American literature." — Aram Mrjoian, author of Waterline
"Naira Kuzmich is the rare writer who slips readers effortlessly into her fictive dream, who makes you forget you are reading her glorious words... This is magnificent, curative writing. Kuzmich was one of the greatest writers of her generation. In every line we can still see her hand." — Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home
"In Ruzan Garsevanian, Naira Kuzmich has created one of the most iron-willed protagonists I've ever read... Fearcatcher is proof that Naira Kuzmich was a fearless storyteller, a writer capable of making—in far too brief a time—a lasting work of art." — Chris McCormick, author of The Gimmicks
Author Bio
Naira Kuzmich was born in Armenia and raised in the Los Angeles enclave of Little Armenia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in West Branch, Blackbird, Ecotone, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the short story collection In Everything I See Your Hand. She passed away in 2017 from lung cancer.
