The Dream Dredger

Roberta Silman’s first story was in The New Yorker; other stories followed there, in The Atlantic, Redbook, McCall’s, Hadassah, VQR, The American Scholar and in many places here and abroad. Her books are Blood Relations, stories; three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again: A Novel of Los Alamos; and two children’s books, Somebody Else’s Child and The Astronomers.   Born in Brooklyn, brought up on Long Island, Silman graduated with honors from Cornell University and has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.   A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction twice. Two stories were read on Selected Shorts, two others won PEN Syndicated Fiction prizes, and several were cited in Best American Short Stories. Somebody Else’s Child won the Child Study Association Award; Blood Relations won honorable mentions for the PEN Hemingway and Janet Heidinger Kafka Prizes; Boundaries won honorable mention for the Kafka Prize; and The Dream Dredger and Beginning the World Again won Washington Irving Awards. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, VQR, The American Scholar, and World Books PRI. She reviews regularly for the online magazine The ArtsFuse.   Ms. Silman is married to structural engineer, Robert Silman, and they have three married children and five grandchildren.

Pregnant with her first child, Diny Branson is haunted by her mother’s death years ago in the Hudson River. Was it suicide or accident? Slowly, Diny weaves the many threads of Lise’s tragic life—from a fairyland youth to a happy marriage, then through the travails of losing a child.   Diny learns how the forces of history, like the coming Holocaust, inflict losses, such as loss of language, that create other more subtle losses—and how the forces of nature, like the majestic Hudson, can be both threat and comfort.