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| Marisa Matarazzo combines abstractions and firm frameworks with the luscious visceral shape-shifting world of bodies and attraction—put all together, it's like watching dyed chiffon spill out of an iron lattice. This is a collection that marks its own territory and stamps it out with a textured beauty. —Aimee Bender |
| Marisa Matarazzo’s voice, fresh and strange as it sounds, is as natural as heartbeat to her characters. I love the way the voices in these accumulating stories breathe—their respirations and inspirations—oddly reassuring as this reader, alarmed by the situations and circumstances Matarazzo has created for her offspring, accepts the extraordinary as the boon it is. Like a fond parent, as just as touchingly, she is in it with her characters all the way over her head. She’s rooting them on; I want readers to root her on. —Geoffry Wolff |
| There’s a wonderful new wave in short stories happening: surprising, weird, uncoupled from standard realism but profoundly real about common feelings. It doesn't have a name yet, only exemplars—you could name George Saunders or Kelly Link, and now Marisa Matarazzo. Don’t miss her or you'll be sorry —John Crowley | |
| Paper | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 256 pgs. | ISBN: 1-59376-271-2 | List: $14.95 | 02/1/2010 |
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About the book: Two lovers accidentally create a love potion while making a batch of Jell-O. An apartment is filled with water as an act of gravity-defying devotion to an acrobat. At turns blissful, absurd, sexy, and devastating, Marisa Matarazzo's stories don't just push the boundaries of love, they show how very boundless it is.
These interconnected shorts take love to a new level, another world, where a sex fever can sweep a town and where sex acts are performed tied to the raised mast of a sailboat. Falling into love, swimming, and drowning in it, the characters often exist in places where land and water collide and morph. A girl without hands is rescued from the sea by an oil-rig worker. A boy transplants a fish into the body of a menacing neighbor. A woman on the rebound has an unexpected encounter with an otherworldly water engineer.
Fusing magical realism and fantastical elements with the heart of the here and now, Matarazzo has established a singular style. As she shifts effortlessly among startling plotlines and peculiar characters, she celebrates the fluid sorcery of love, in its ardor, its ugliness, all of its uncanny and magnificent manifestations, she proclaims love as the most wondrous magic of all.
About the author: Marisa Matarazzo holds an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship. At Yale she received the Wallace Prize for fiction writing, the Arthur Willis Colton Scholarship, and was a two-time recipient of the Elmore A. Willets Prize for fiction. This her first book. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
From the book:
Follow me, I say. I go to the kitchen, exit out the window, onto the fire escape. She squints hard, shades her eyes, climbs up after me. On the roof the tar paper blisters. We step slowly across the top of our apartment. Our sandals rustle and crunch the fine gravel littered across the roof. I lead her to the skylight.
I smell water, she says. We stop at the skylight. Stand over it. The burbling is loud.
What's this? she asks smiling. Her long lashes are wet and sparkling with sweat. She smudges her forehead with the back of her arm.
I grin at her, hold out my hand. She takes it. I drop head first through the skylight into the bedroom. She follows.
The room is filled with water, floor to ceiling. Our bodies slippery, salty sweat washed over in cold water. We float still for a moment, suspended, in the middle of the room. Arms out, legs apart, like skydivers. We feel the cool. |
