About the Author
Queer author Virginia L. Lewis is passionate about writing inclusive fiction. The novels in her series Romance at the Fiber Guild celebrate all things fiber, and the diverse people who turn yarn into things of beauty and value.
A world where acceptance wins the day over intolerance, that’s what I seek to portray.
VIRGINIA L. LEWIS
Translator, Scholar, Fiber Crafter
Virginia L. Lewis began writing fiction as a teenager and published her first short story in 1987. She identifies as gender-fluid and ace, and is also a single mother by choice with two awesome sons, and a daughter who is proudly queer. Lewis’s commitment to narrating the experiences of marginalized people is informed by witnessing what her beloved brother often endured as a gay man in search of a safe community. His struggle to find happiness in a society that challenged his right to be who he was is a key motivation behind Lewis’s hopeful portrayal of a world where acceptance wins the day over intolerance.
Lewis is a literary scholar, translator, and German professor with a passion for language, as well as a certified braille transcriber and avid musician. A needlepointer for all of her adult life, she discovered the wonders of knitting when her younger son learned the craft in his high school fashion class. She has since taken up spinning as well. Lewis lives in South Dakota with her six cats and three dogs and takes enormous pride in her three adult children, who teach her new lessons about life and its rewards with each passing day.
Gold in the Mud: A Hungarian Peasant Novel, 2014
Translation of Sárarany (1910) by Zsigmond Móricz
Globalizing the Peasant: Access to Land and the Possibility of Self-Realization
A theoretical model and application of global literature, published by Lexington Books
Romance at the Fiber Guild is a multi-volume celebration of life, love, and floof!
Schön Kästnerisch verfahren
In this exciting German-language novel, Twelve-year-old Andrea Heinrichsen leaves her loving, if somewhat overprotective mother, to take part in a three-week orchestra festival in Leipzig. There she meets up with the likewise twelve-year-old Angela Heinrichsen, who bears shocking resemblance to her, and the illusory family life her mother had built up around Andrea caves in on itself. Determined to get to the bottom of things, the twins emulate the main characters from The Parent Trap and trade places, unaware of the dangers that lurk ahead. Surprise follows surprise as events unfold in this suspenseful novel. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Virginia-L-Lewis/dp/9403645857/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title
Gold in the Mud: A Hungarian Peasant Novel
Translation of the novel Sárarany (1910) by Zsigmond Móricz. Torn between the torpid bliss of his home life and a seething quest for prosperity, Dani Turi, the peasant Don Juan and leader of Kiskara village, follows his urge to break the bonds of his low social status, only to find his path barred by the aristocratic landowners bent on maintaining their centuries-long hold on the reins of power. Zsigmond Móricz (1879-1942), one of Hungary’s greatest novelists and the first to portray the peasant classes with full regard for their human aspirations, reveals in this riveting narrative his mastery in drawing complex characters and evoking the unique atmosphere of rural Hungary. https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Mud-Hungarian-Peasant-Novel/dp/0990638103/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title
Orphalina
Translation of the novel Árvácska (1941) by Zsigmond Móricz. Arguably the most gut-wrenching, and simultaneously the most lyrical of Zsigmond Móricz’s numerous novels, Orphalina recounts events inspired by the real-life experiences of Erzsébet Litkei (1916-1971), an orphaned girl whom Móricz met in Budapest in 1934. As the tragic fate of “Orphalina State,” the protagonist in this novel, reveals, Litkei was clearly a touchstone for Móricz in his quest to reveal the deepest layers of suffering in interwar Hungarian society, and to uncover the forces at work in stifling the agency of human beings deserving of access to a good life. https://www.amazon.com/Orphalina-Zsigmond-M%C3%B3ricz/dp/099063812X/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title
In the Godforsaken Hinterlands: A Tale of Provincial Hungary
Translation of the novel Az Isten háta mögött (1911) by Zsigmond Móricz. In the Godforsaken Hinterlands represents a uniquely Hungarian take on the adultery theme developed in Gustave Flaubert’s wildly popular Madame Bovary from 1856. Writing half a century later, Zsigmond Móricz introduces surprising innovations into his narration of a bored teacher’s wife and her oblivious husband, making In the Godforsaken Hinterlands a classic in its own right. The stultifying atmosphere of semi-feudal Hungary finds telling expression in the fictional town of Ilosva where the novel is set. https://www.amazon.com/Godforsaken-Hinterlands-Tale-Provincial-Hungary/dp/0990638111/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title
Romance at the Fiber Guild
This fictional celebration of fiber crafting and diversity now numbers six volumes and counting. Reviewers of the preview copies praise the series for its heartfelt interweaving of the characters’ colorful and sometimes turbulent lives with the creative textures of knitting, spinning, crocheting, weaving, and more in these novels set in the inspiring oasis of “Prairie Plains,” located somewhere in a magical corner of the United States.