the LATEST BY CAROLYN COOKE
Amor and Psycho: Stories
Carolyn Cooke is the award-winning author of The Bostons and Daughters of the Revolution
AT ONCE PHILOSOPHICAL AND COMPULSIVELY READABLE, AMOR AND PSYCHO DIVES INTO OUR DARKEST SPACES, CONFRONTING THE ABSURDITY, POETRY AND BRUTALITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE.
From the author of Daughters of the Revolution and The Bostons (winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for fiction) come eleven stories about sex and death, violence and desire, love and madness, set in a vast American landscape that ranges from the largest private residence in Manhattan to the lush rainforests and marijuana farms of northern California.
“Roberto Bolaño defined high-caliber writing as having "the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love." It's not enough to write well, he argued, not enough to write extremely well. The very best write on the edge.
Carolyn Cooke, a Mendocino County writer whose novel "Daughters of the Revolution" was a 2011 Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year, is Bolaño's kind of writer. She approaches subjects of sex and death, desire and illness, and the borderland between sanity and madness, civilization and the wild with a directness that is both disarming and enthralling.”