Yanara Friedland with Miranda Mellis — 'Thanatographies'

Third Place Books welcomes writer, translator, and educator Yanara Friedland to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new book, : a genre-defying meditation on disappearance, memory, and the porous boundaries between the living and the dead. author Miranda Mellis joins in conversation.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured books!

This event is free to attend. Registration is recommended in advance.

Please note: While RSVP helps us anticipate attendance, your RSVP may not guarantee a seat. Seating is first-come, first-served, and all events at our Ravenna neighborhood store are free and open to the public. Only standing room may be available for events with high interest.

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A haunting, poetic excavation of memory, the nocturnal imagination, and a search for new forms of language to act upon legacies of violence and erasure.

Thanatographies is a genre-defying meditation on disappearance, memory, and the porous boundaries between the living and the dead. In poetic prose, Yanara Friedland weaves together dreamscapes, historical fragments, personal recollections, and philosophical inquiry to explore the afterlives of loss and survival. Moving through rooms, cities, forests, and archives, the text becomes a living document of insomnia, exile, and the spectral presence of women across time, including artists, revolutionaries, caretakers, and ghosts.

Structured in four sections titled Room, Night, Medusas, and Burials, the book traverses inner and outer landscapes, from Berlin’s haunted streets to the intimate terrain of the body. Friedland’s voice is both lyrical and incisive, drawing on figures such as Unica Zürn, Rosa Luxemburg, and Else Lasker-Schüler to illuminate the intersections of gender, violence, and historical erasure. The result is a deeply embodied poetics of wakefulness, where hidden life remembers and speaks.

Thanatographies is written for readers of experimental literature, feminist theory, and contemporary poetics. The book resonates with artists, scholars, and seekers who are compelled by the aesthetics of mourning, the politics of memory, and the radical potential of language to hold what is otherwise unspeakable.

Yanara Friedland is a writer, translator, and educator born in Berlin. She is the author of Uncountry: A Mythology (2016), winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Book Award, and Groundswell (2021), selected by Jill Magi for Essay Press's Book Award. Both books have recently appeared in German translation with Matthes & Seitz Berlin. Her third book Thanatographies is now out from FC2/University of Alabama Press. She is the recipient of research grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work explores the effects of dislocation on memory and language, engaging with multilingual and transhistorical spaces through archival research, nocturnal imagination, and in collaboration with other artists. She teaches creative writing and literature at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and co-runs the reading series Mutter Courage in the Pacific Northwest.

Miranda Mellis is the author of Crocosmia (2025), Demystifications (2021), The Instead,The Spokes (2012), None of This Is Real (2012), and The Revisionist (2007). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Millay Colony. She received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, the Michael S. Harper Praxis Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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