SUZANNE REISMAN

MANUSCRIPTS

The Untervelt Private Investigators

Andrea Klein walked into my office like all potential clients do— unsteady gait, wringing hands, eyes darting everywhere and nowhere. In other words, she was nervous as fuck. And why shouldn’t she be? No one with a normal request came to talk to Underworld Private Investigators, Inc., the detective agency I ran with my grandparents.

Speculative Fiction

  • Yael Tsoyberer and her Holocaust survivor grandparents run a private investigation agency specializing in cases involving the Jewish supernatural. When a woman asks them to investigate whether her fiance was kidnapped by demons, the situation is far more complicated than it first seems, with the stakes unfathomably high.

Sam Berger Escapes the Demon Kingdom

With only ten days to go until Sam’s bat mitzvah, she sat at her desk in her pink bedroom. Tears burned her eyes. Her narrow pale face was lit by the bluish glow of her laptop screen as she stared at it. Rabbi Ari’s curly hair bounced up and down as she explained how to pronounce some of the words that Sam stumbled over when she had chanted her Torah portion a few minutes ago. Rabbi Ari was smiling, and her voice kind, but Sam remained frustrated. Every day, she practiced all the prayers and readings she would do at the event, but she was no closer to getting it perfect than she had been when she started preparing for the religious ceremony six months earlier.

Middle Grade Fantasy

  • Sam Berger discovers that her anxiety and being kidnapped by demons aren’t the biggest obstacles she must overcome before her bat mitzvah ceremony. Even after teaming up with an elderly enchanted head, her annoying younger brother, and a variety of Jewish magical and mythical creatures, she must tap into her inner strength to battle an evil spirit determined to destroy the world.

The Heart Is Half a Prophet

Upmarket/Book Club Fiction

My birth mother died twice while she was pregnant with me. A month before I was due, a drunk driver piloted his BMW into her rusted Cutlass while she was driving home from her job as a grocery store cashier. She never made it to the hospital. The EMTs cut me free from her corpse, cheating the Angel of Death out of collecting two prizes that evening. But she had already been declared dead two months earlier, when her Hasidic family found out their unmarried daughter was pregnant and sat shiva for her. Because of this, no grandparents, aunts, or uncles claimed me at the hospital. My birth mother died without revealing my father’s identity, so there was no family reunion on that side, either.

That’s what the adoption agency told my parents.

  • Even though Eve Harris's adoptive family lavished her with love as she grew up, she always felt something was missing. Only when she attends college and meets two young women who were also adopted, who share her birthday, and who look identical to her, she realizes she had unconsciously needed them all her life. Years later, when Eve and her sisters are creating their own families, they learn a devastating secret that threatens the foundation of the relationship they worked so hard to build. When Eve locates her biological family, her grandmother shares a mystical revelation that might save them.

This Eden Called Warsaw

Literary Historical Fiction

Thirty-one days after his father’s death, Motl Rajsman set out for a barber in the Muranów. For a moment he wavered. His eyes watered, and he wiped them with the scratchy sleeve of his coat. He felt split between two worlds: the life he had known with his Hasidic father and what was to come without Hersh’s strict oversight of the family. His father had always been confident that there was only one proper way of life.

  • Motl Rajsman is a young man navigating 1930s Warsaw, where the large Jewish community is a bubbling cauldron of ideologies and worldviews. Pulled between the religious traditions of his family and the more liberal lifestyle he wants to live, Motl manages to alienate the people he loves most. As the decade moves on, Motl makes amends through a series of decisions to protect his family from the increasing danger of antisemitism, but can he succeed in saving them all?

PUBLISHED WRITING

  • Off the Beaten (Subway) Track: New York City’s Best Unusual Attractions

    While it may seem that every possible attraction in New York City has been written about, Off the Beaten (Subway) Track is the city’s first guide to focus on one hundred unique, off-the-beaten-path destinations.

    BOOKSHOP.ORG | AMAZON

    Contributed to Armchair Reader: Haunted America

  • The Angel of Conception
    featured in Bookanista

    Lailah the angel stands at the edge of the Garden of Eden, surveying. She sees apple trees, fig trees, grape vines, pumpkin patches, wheat, corn, and the plants we eat from. Birdsong fills the air.

    Visiting Hour
    featured in Bookanista

    The hospital room smelled of antiseptic cleaner, but it could not mask the odor of sickness. It was Michael’s eighty-fourth birthday. He did not feel like celebrating.

    The Appointment
    featured in The Sunlight Press

    After work, Magda went to meet her lover in Plac Bankowy. As always, she had aimed to look her best, dressing in a slim blue dress and matching hat.

    When Your Husband Is Arrested
    featured in Flash Fiction Magazine

    When you first see your husband in handcuffs at the station house, tears build back so far in your eyes, it seems they are filling your sinus cavities. You blink, but it does not break the dam.

  • Welcoming the (Abortion-Seeking) Stranger: Reflections for a Season of Renewal
    featured in Zeek

    “This is Meredith,” the voice on the phone announced one afternoon in March. “We have someone who needs a place to stay for the night.”

AWARDS & HONORS

2018 Bath Novel Award, Longlist

The Triplets of the Chosen

2015 Caledonia Novel Award, Longlist

This Eden Called Warsaw

2015 Bath Novel Award, Longlist

This Eden Called Warsaw

2010 New School Chapbook Contest, Nonfiction, Winner

Family Reunion

ABOUT SUZANNE

“There are about a million things I want to be when I grow up,” Suzanne Reisman wrote in a semi-autobiographical story when she was in fourth or fifth grade. “First of all, I want to be an author, second an advertiser, and third a baseball umpire.”

Making good on her first interest, Suzanne earned an MFA in creative writing from the New School.

When not writing, Suzanne is neither an advertiser nor a baseball umpire. Instead, she puts her Master’s in Public Administration / Public Policy to good use by working with non-profit organizations in New York City.

Suzanne spent her formative years in a comfortable house across from the Edens Expressway in the Chicago suburbs, but now lives in Manhattan with her husband, her teddy bear, and the ghost of her 13 lb. pet rabbit. Unwilling to fully abandon her roots, she insists on calling soda “pop,” and sneakers “gym shoes.” A recovered Cubs fan, she now roots for the New York Mets. She enjoys Yiddish humor, House Hunters International, eating, wandering around cities, and sleeping.

Contact suzanne

You may contact Suzanne directly through the form. She looks forward to hearing from you.

Suzanne Reisman is represented by Maria Napolitano at kt literary.