Winner of the 2022 Chapbook Open

Naomi Telushkin

Read Kim Fu’s introduction here.

You can purchase a copy of Coats from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

About the Author

NAOMI TELUSHKIN is a writer based in Sydney, and an Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Canberra.

Praise for Coats

“Naomi Telushkin’s Coats reads like a geopolitical thriller in miniature, deftly weaving together threads of global politics, religious identity, erotic possibility, and more into a story of rich emotional ambiguity set amid seemingly immovable forces and perhaps impossible desires. A fantastic read that you won’t soon forget.”

—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

“What does it mean to hold power in this moment, a power that is born from old wealth, from capital, from corrupting influence? What does it mean for that power to seduce and entrance, to invite into the realm of the mystical and the ordinary? Naomi Telushkin explores these questions with prose that is as vital as her main character, Ayala. Coats as a novella is uniquely shaped and derives its own power from the mystery of Rabbi Nachman’s verses and from the sure hand of a remarkably gifted writer.”

—Jai Chakrabarti, author of A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness and A Play for the End of the World

“With the compression of poetry and the breathtaking pace of a political thriller, Naomi Telushkin tells parallel stories of violence: the violence of a passionate extramarital affair, over decades, as the narrator experiences this, and the political violence of an oppressive regime, as inflicted upon its journalists and intellectuals. There is violence, too, in the disintegration of childhood faith and decades-long love. I marveled at the richness of these pages and look forward to reading more from her soon.”

—Chaya Bhuvaneswar, author of White Dancing Elephants: Stories, a finalist for the Pen/American Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction Prize.