In Crazy Water: Six Fictions, Lori Baker pushes the boundaries between truth and reality with curious, tragi-comic results. The imagination is Baker's terrain, and in these stories, pleasant suburban childhoods, family drives, seaside vacations, and an academic's quest for tenure all are strangely warped, yet nonetheless still mirror a world we thought we knew. In these brief pages, boys become dogs, students hide in the molluscan places, and mothers do their best to rescind their unsatisfying children. "I say things smugly as if I understand them, muses one of Baker's narrators. Indeed, characters and readers alike are undermined in these deft and quirky fictions. Exposing and imploding all of our expectations, Baker shows us how menacing (and funny) the apparently ordinary can be.
I write in retrospect, from the vantage of a distant shore. Flame-haired, six-foot-two in stocking feet, eighteen-year-old Carlotta Dell’oro recounts the lives of her parents—solitary glassmaker Leopoldo Dell’oro and beautiful, unreachable Clotilde Girard—and discovers in their loves and losses, their omissions and obsessions, thecircumstances of her abandonment and the weight of her inheritance. Thomas Pynchon calls debut novelist Lori Baker “a storyteller with uncanny access to the Victorians, not only to the closely woven texture of their days but also to the dangerous nocturnal fires being attended to in their hearts.” Carlotta’s story begins in 1841, when Leo and Clotilde meet aboard the Narcissus, on an expedition led by Clotilde’s magnanimous, adventuring father. Leo is commissioned to draw the creatures of the deep sea, but is bewitched instead by golden Clotilde, beginning a devotion that will prove inescapable. Clotilde meanwhile sees only her dear papa, but when he goes missing she is pushed to Leo, returning with him to the craggy English shores of Whitby, the place to which Leo vowed he would never return. There they form an uneasy coexistence, lost to one another. The events of the Narcissus haunt them, leaving Clotilde grieving for her father, while Leo becomes possessed by the work of transforming his sea sketches into glass. But in finding his art he surrenders Clotilde, and the distance between the two is only magnified by the birth of baby Carlotta. Years have passed, and Carlotta is now grown. A friend from the past comes to Whitby, and with his arrival sets into motion the Dell’oros’ inevitable disintegration. In hypnotic, inimitable prose Lori Baker’s The Glass Ocean transforms a story of family into something as otherworldly and mesmerizing as life beneath the sea itself.
I write in retrospect, from the vantage of a distant shore. Flame-haired, six-foot-two in stocking feet, eighteen-year-old Carlotta Dell’oro recounts the lives of her parents—solitary glassmaker Leopoldo Dell’oro and beautiful, unreachable Clotilde Girard—and discovers in their loves and losses, their omissions and obsessions, thecircumstances of her abandonment and the weight of her inheritance. Thomas Pynchon calls debut novelist Lori Baker “a storyteller with uncanny access to the Victorians, not only to the closely woven texture of their days but also to the dangerous nocturnal fires being attended to in their hearts.” Carlotta’s story begins in 1841, when Leo and Clotilde meet aboard the Narcissus, on an expedition led by Clotilde’s magnanimous, adventuring father. Leo is commissioned to draw the creatures of the deep sea, but is bewitched instead by golden Clotilde, beginning a devotion that will prove inescapable. Clotilde meanwhile sees only her dear papa, but when he goes missing she is pushed to Leo, returning with him to the craggy English shores of Whitby, the place to which Leo vowed he would never return. There they form an uneasy coexistence, lost to one another. The events of the Narcissus haunt them, leaving Clotilde grieving for her father, while Leo becomes possessed by the work of transforming his sea sketches into glass. But in finding his art he surrenders Clotilde, and the distance between the two is only magnified by the birth of baby Carlotta. Years have passed, and Carlotta is now grown. A friend from the past comes to Whitby, and with his arrival sets into motion the Dell’oros’ inevitable disintegration. In hypnotic, inimitable prose Lori Baker’s The Glass Ocean transforms a story of family into something as otherworldly and mesmerizing as life beneath the sea itself.
Sometimes wildly funny, yet often serious, jarringly uncanny yet realistic, the stories in Lori Baker's Crash & Tell seem to come from a different time and place. In her darkly whimsical world, Baker plays with a variety of narrative voices and styles, skillfully treading the line between traditional storytelling and the literary avant-garde. The interconnected stories provide a revealing account of women's lives, exploring the dark side of romance and the workplace. Laced with the surreal, the familiar neighborhoods of our lives grow strange through the lens of memory and murder. From the comical re-imagining of Jane Goodall's life among the apes -- told from the eyes of Jane as a debutante escapee -- to a professional research subject who outwits a cunning psychiatrist; a photographer who must come to grips with a peculiar family obsession; a bored wife on vacation experiencing an unexpected seaside interlude with an oddly menacing dentist; and a car crash that leads to the most unromantic of romances -- the alienated suburbanites of these tales value memories (and ghosts) over people.
In Crash & Tell, Lori Baker plays with a variety of narrative voices and styles, skillfully treading the line between traditional storytelling and the literary avant-garde. The collection provides a unique account of women's lives, exploring the dark side of romance, workplaces laced with the surreal, and familiar neighborhoods made strange through the lens of memory and murder.
Eager to help Mr. Pete the Baker make his delicious treats, Flat Stanley and Arthur participate in Mr. Pete's plan to reclaim his customers from a business rival.
Jesse Bradley knows it's wrong to lust after her bodyguard, but she can't help it. Zach Harris is stunningly sexy, down to earth, funny, and around 24/7. How can she fight the attraction?
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