That Night Alive

Fiction. Part futuristic fiction and part meditative memoir, THAT NIGHT ALIVE begins on the narrator's death date and moves backward in time to tell her story. She traces her path as a successful crypto-reporter, navigating a life of secrecy and solitude and world travel. A counter-narrative intersects, told by the same woman as a young artist struggling to create a work of beauty. THAT NIGHT ALIVE investigates art and failure, persistence and success.

"Beautifully paced, THAT NIGHT ALIVE records a woman's yearning to make something lasting in a post-apocalyptic world of surveillance and subterfuge where genuine art is forbidden. Tara Deal's ambitious, inventive, continually surprising, and finely etched novella immerses us in a woman's struggles and rewards the most close and attentive reading."—Lee Upton

"In Tara Deal's THAT NIGHT ALIVE moments as vivid and complex as any actually lived weave a narrative of compelling intimacy. Unexpected images ask to be unpacked, considered, and remembered. The narrative plays with time in a language that provokes curiosity as we progress into the text and its world."—Andrew Davison, Managing Editor, Glassworks Magazine

Tara Deal is a writer in New York City. Her previous novella, Palms Are Not Trees After All, won the 2007 novella prize from Texas Review Press. Her shortest story can be found in Hint Fiction (Norton).