The fiction of Thaisa Frank, according to The New York Times, works by a "tantalizing sense of indirection". The critic Don Skiles has described her stories as being "in the grand tradition of the fairy tale, the legend, the spell", and the reviewer Rob Hurwitt has called her work "domestic magical realism."

Thaisa Frank's short stories have received two PEN awards, and her two most recent collections SLEEPING IN VELVET, 1998, and A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAMOUFLAGE, 1992) have been on the Bestseller List of the San Francisco Chronicle. A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAMOUFLAGE was included in Dalton's New Voices. Both have been nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewer's Association Award.

In addition to collections of short fiction Thaisa Frank's work has appeared in numerous anthologies, among the most recent of which is the Polish anthology ROZNE KSZTALTY MILOSCI and Harper/Collins READER'S CHOICE. New work appears in The Dictionary of Sex (Bloomsbury Press), VOLT, and Viking/Penguin's new edition of Voltaire, among others. 

She has also written FINDING YOUR WRITER'S VOICE, co-authored with Dorothy Wall, published in l994 with St. Martin's Press. It has been compared to Brenda Uleland's book IF YOU WANT TO WRITE and has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish. Thaisa Frank has taught writing in the graduate department of San Francisco State, is on the part-time faculty at the University of San Francisco and has been Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to Polish, her fiction has been translated into Finnish.

Recently, Frank's current books of fiction are available from David R. Godine who has bought the Black Sparrow imprimatur. Her work, along with books by D.H. Lawrence, Edward Dorn and Andrei Codrescu, was one of the few selected from the Black Sparrow List to be featured in Godine's recent catalogue.

About Frank's work, Godine writes: Few writers on the Black Sparrow list could be classified as "mainstream," that is, as people whose fiction could (and in Frank's case probably should) appear in The New Yorker. But these stories are just that, reading like a cross between modern fairy tales and Kafkaesque nightmares, stories in which the lines between reality and magic are deliberately blurred, and the unexpected connection, the unintended result, become commonplace. This probably sounds vaguely harrowing, and it would be were it not for Frank's wit and her sense of humor.

 Thaisa's novel, Heidegger's Glasses, is coming out this spring in audio and CD as well as hardcover. 

Heidegger’s Glasses opens during the end of World War II in a failing Germany coming apart at its seams.  The Third Reich’s obsession with scrupulous record-keep and its strong reliance on the occult, has led to the formation of an underground compound of scribes –translators responsible for answering letters written by prisoners in concentration camps often moments before they were led to the gas chambers.

Into this covert compound comes a letter written by eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger to his optometrist, a man now lost in the dying thralls of Auschwitz.  How will the scribes answer this letter?  The presence of Heidegger’s words –one simple letter in a place filled with letters – sparks a series of events that will ultimately threaten the safety and well-being of the entire compound.

Part love story, part thriller, part meditation on how the dead are remembered and history is presented, with threads of Heidegger’s philosophy woven throughout, the novel evocatively illustrates the Holocaust through an almost dreamlike state. Thaisa Frank deftly reconstructs the landscape of Nazi Germany from an entirely original vantage point.