Lauren Becker lives in Austin, Texas. She has worked as an attorney, a health care policy analyst and advocate, a freelance writer, and a disability specialist. Her fiction has appeared at Tin House online, Hobart, the Los Angeles Review, Pedestal Magazine, Wigleaf, [PANK], and NANO Fiction. Her non-fiction has been featured on The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown. She is editor of the online literary journal, Corium Magazine.
This collection of quick fiction is like a playlist of enthralling
songs with every one a smash hit. The works share their author's
gifts for distilled melodies and methods of great persuasion, for
elegance of line, for the poignant or expectant detail, for a
recognition of the sweet or funny or sexy or sad facets of lives
unfolding. Here are blueberry scones, tattoos that say "Nothing,"
the scent of morning toast and the derived identities that might
attend a bridesmaid, a stricken daughter, lovers as hunter or prey.
But the stories do more. The young women narrators who talk us
through these living moments seem often to be courting or rejecting
mates, but they are driven by deeper, more mysterious impulses, for
meanings and answers to our deepest questions.
-- James Robison, author of The Illustrator I can't explain the
alchemy at work in a Lauren Becker story. Is it her voice, so real
and immediate, so smooth in its resident sentences? Or is it
something else--what happens beneath the accessible surface: how we
might come to see we're not reading; we're being read? I've got no
answers. But I'm ready to tell you this: no one at work in American
fiction is doing what Becker does.
-- Scott Garson, author of Is That You, John Wayne? I've been
reading Lauren Becker's stories for years and couldn't be happier
to have them all collected in one place. Her stories inspire me to
write, which is the highest compliment I can give to any
writer.
-- Mary Miller, author of The Last Days of California "An
arresting, instantly recognizable voice. In compressed and furious
prose, and with a flasher's urgent vulnerability, Lauren Becker
scratches the surface of yearning until it bleeds into
stories."
-- Carolyn Cooke, author of Amor and Psycho I dig bellying up to
one of Becker's stories. She knows how to mix that perfect
cocktail--equal parts pathos and elegant insight, with just a
splash of humor. Fans of Amy Hempel will drink these stories down
and immediately order another!
-- Joshua Mohr, author of Fight Song
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