Soft Split

by Szilvia Molnar

Soft Split is a dark tale about love, betrayal, dreaming, sex, airports, and office tension. Szilvia Molnar is a fearless fictional deviant.

Genres: Fiction

32 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 22, 2015

About the author

Szilvia Molnar is the foreign rights director at a New York-based literary agency, and author of a chapbook called Soft Split. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Lit Hub, Triangle House Review, Two Serious Ladies, The Buenos Aires Review, and Neue Rundschau. Szilvia is from Budapest and was raised in Sweden. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Her debut novel titled The Nursery published with Pantheon Books, March 2023, and is forthcoming in eight languages.

Photo credit: Ben Mistak

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a fun book to publish. Szilvia's a wonderfully fearless writer and this story--a dream-like narrative about a love falling apart--feels like a glorious return to the weird for Future Tense. It's also really funny. A multi-layered dive into the psyche of a spurned woman. So excited to see what else this great writer does from now on.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little pink book is a fucking powerhouse. I have never liked the use of ampersands until now. I have the utmost reverence and sheer admiration for this woman. I read this in one sitting because it's tiny and with my jaw dropped because it's perfectly racy. I wanna quote her always. "Corporate. Expanding. Merging. Concurring."
So gooooooood!

[Faith Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

SOFT SPLIT is physically tiny - about 2.5 x 3.5 inches - which shouldn't matter, but it does, because it's too small for a bag and will end up in your pocket, and you'll forget it's there, and when you remember it you'll be shot through with an illicit thrill, like when you first started buying condoms and just looking at them made you feel embarrassed and excited. You'll end up reading it in public, waiting for clothes to dry at the laundromat or riding on the train, and when the buzzer announces the end of the cycle, when the train slides to a stop you'll look up, blushing, at the non-profane around you. Ostensibly about an ambivalent woman in an early marriage, the text consists of fragments of moments ranging from domestic and banal to startlingly obscene. It's incredibly engrossing even while exploiting conventional taboos and is at once nasty and beautiful.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too dreamlike to be possible, too real to be impossible. I loved this very little book. I wanted a hundred times more of it.

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Described this to a friend as "AFTER BIRTH by way of Pessoa," which I think fits.

[Maria Provenzano · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful dream-like stream of consciousness. Contains such powerful imagery that illicit even more powerful emotions.

[Hans · Rating 1 out of 5]

Caboosing on the trendy does not a sensualist make; the bifurcations in this split do not fit.
Derivative drivel, alas.