Psychologically nuanced and dense with detail, the stories in her debut collection Ice Orange are mostly about women whose lives were shaped by the 20th century, a time when people learned to understand each other more from what was unsaid, when each step seemed to be both more difficult and more meaningful than it is now. These sketches of lives, from childhood through adulthood – both the minor as well as significant dramas – are full of familiar emotions, nostalgic details, and unspoken secrets. The stories in this short collection offer quick reads that will nonetheless leave a tangible impression, allowing insight into life through the prism of Vīgante’s marvelous and delicate prose.

Contact: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv

The nine stories in the collection We Shall See continue and add to
the spectrum of themes already touched upon in Vīgante’s debut collection, Ice Orange – the most prominent being the complicated relationships between people throughout time. Vīgante’s prose possesses a specific “quiet” style, as it includes no loud epithets or overtly dramatic dialogues – and it is precisely this veiled approach that allows Vīgante to convey the “inner dramas” of her characters so well. The stories are often explicitly visual, concentrating, as it seems, on abundant detail; however, Vīgante manages to include the symbolic subtext in each visual image as well. The stories are largely set in a modern environment and feature average people – men or women around 30-40 years of age who have witnessed the dramatic political and social changes at the turn of the century, but nevertheless hold survival and personal happiness as their main goals in life. This allows readers to identify with the characters and situations, however complicated they are, because the familiarity of the environment and the details make it easy to do so.

Contact: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv