By Ellen Elias-Bursać

Dan Simon’s debut novel blends polyphonic storytelling with keen attention to the natural world and its emotional echoes.

Ashland by Dan Simon. Europa Editions, 208 pages, $14.99

This is the debut novel of Dan Simon, who has run Seven Stories Press for thirty years. As editor-in-chief, he has edited fiction by hundreds of writers. Now he has taken his turn.

Ashland interweaves the voices of five narrators, dominated by the character of Carolyn. After taking a writing course at a local college, she devotes herself to sketching the women in her life, the men, the children, the neighbors, always with an eye for the lakes, rivers, fields and mountains of central New Hampshire. “I’m a writer. It’s the only thing I know for sure,” Carolyn states. “and I don’t know how I know it, it’s something that comes entirely from inside.” She lives in a household mostly peopled by women: “We are lengths of string, nothing more, fixed at one end, frayed at the other, constantly unraveling.”

Through Carolyn’s eyes we see the small town of Ashland: “Most of the red brick buildings along the river below the drop aren’t in operation now, just a bare bones activity there. The storefronts along Main Street, same story. There was a grand hotel and all the rest… But you get the feeling that it’s a ghost town compared to what was here once.” And “There’s just something halfway about the town. Halfway victories, halfway defeats, not necessarily sad but for the halfwayness itself.”

The powerful passages in Ashland present Carolyn’s view of the natural world around her: ‘Our beach is like an itchy scar, or like when someone says the wrong thing and you know right away that the words can’t be taken back… And at the same time our beach is the nicest and most peaceful spot on the entire lake, unnatural and ruined as it is.”

Water flows through this novel in many forms, always shaping life and landscape: “Underneath the lake there are many unseen springs that spew forth the water the mountains are releasing, and it flows silently into the lake from below with an unseen power.” The countryside is also shaped by glaciers: “the slowest dance of all.”

Landscape and water, as both sources of change and constancy, are also seen through the sharp eyes of Carolyn’s neighbor, Gordon: “The shapes of streams and lakes are shifting constantly, even while, at the same time, they remain silent and still and unchanging. There is a primeval metamorphosing happening in every moment—a clearing returns to dense forest, and then in that same space the giants, the white pine, the great oak, maple and elm will take over from the first growth green ash, alder, poplar and birch. A stream bed will bloom into a wetlands and then become a pasture. Nothing moving, the lay of the land the same as it has been for hundreds of years at the same time as there is this churning.”

Andy, briefly Carolyn’s brother-in-law, a lifelong Granite Stater, addresses with regret the demise of farming in New Hampshire that he has witnessed in his lifetime: “But the fields, pretty as they may be, serve no purpose now, have no reason to be here except to rest troubled eyes. This isn’t to complain, I never liked doing fieldwork, but what a difference from how it used to be! And I saw it both ways, before and after, so the shock and wonder of it is as close as you’ll get to a dictionary definition of myself. In me is the gracious and giving land as it was before, and in me along with the rest of my generation is a place uprooted and cast aside.” Beyond its nuanced attention to landscape, Ashland also explores family life, its joys and loss, including teenage parenting, in compelling ways.

Simon’s years of experience working with the craft of fiction are evident. Here is a lyrical passage on grief that I will carry with me: “…I can hear her like a note in music that doesn’t waver but doesn’t strain or falter either, it’s the good in her, the part that is still so alive to me, it’s that sweetness that makes me feel like I can’t go on.” Always the editor, he pares away the superfluous in Ashland to serve the essence of his story.

Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating novels, stories, and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers for the last thirty years. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Gotz and Meyer, 2004 (Britain) and 2005 (US), was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translators Association in 2006, and Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić in her translation was given the EBRD Prize for Literature in 2025. She has also translated writing by Damir Karakaš, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Karim Zaimović. She served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association for over ten years.