152 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / 4 b&w illustrations
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.
Lori Baker, has taught writing at Brown University, Boston College, and Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts and is the author of Crazy Water, which won the Mamdouha S. Bobst Literary Award for Short Stories.
" Readers will come away hungry for more from this macabre, humorous, and tantalizing voice."
"Yet in these mostly sardonic tales, Baker’s characters are reasonably (if ironically) self-aware. The stories are also, in general, wickedly amusing and Baker’s writing is both precise and quirky. Word choices often surprise but they also work in context. These are misfit stories after all and esoteric terms here and there rightly emphasize the absurdities facing her oddball protagonists. Every woman here is lost or searching or patiently waiting for life to come to her—rarely do they get what they want, if they even know what they want. They’re bourgeois pawns of their own (or their mothers’) making—with one character even happily recycling sad clichés."
"Crash & Tell is imagination with purpose; this is a collection of short stories that encourages us to conceive more richly of the lives of even those who we meet in passing."
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