Widow's Dozen
Marek Waldorf
(Author)
Description
Product Details
| Publisher | Turtle Point Press |
| Publish Date | September 09, 2014 |
| Pages | 336 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781933527772 |
| Dimensions | 6.9 X 4.5 X 0.9 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
MAREK WALDORF is the author of The Short Fall and Widow's Dozen (Turtle Point Press). He was born in Washington DC, and grew up in various places: Idi Amin's Uganda, coup-wracked Thailand, punk-era England, and apartheid-encircled Lesotho, but primarily Binghamton, NY. He studied Philosophy at Harvard, started a PhD in American Literature at UCLA and left after a year, moving to San Francisco, where he appeared in Jon Moritsugu's Hippy Porn (1991).
The Short Fall was begun in a small village in Northern Cameroon and finished, four years later, in Livingstonia, overlooking Lake Malawi. Most of the book was written in Washington DC and on the Upper West Side of New York City, overlooking an air shaft. The stories in Widow's Dozen all postdate the novel. Waldorf's essays and reviews have appeared in The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, where he served as Fiction Editor and Editor-at-Large.
Waldorf's grandfather, Darwin Teilhet, wrote more than 25 novels--most of them popular mysteries of the 1930s and 1940s--including The Fearmakers (1945), a conspiracy thriller set in Washington D.C., the film of which was directed by Jacques Tourneur. Aggregation of internet-sourced data (true and false) about author and his immediate family, along with an old passport, can be found here.
Contact author at [email protected].
Reviews
Marek Waldorf's deeply original stories inhabit the reader like demons who won't be exorcized. He implants alternative realities inside ordinary ones and takes them for granted-as do his characters. If the purpose of art is to make the world strange again, this is brilliant art. And the writing is beautiful, the shapes of the sentences, the quick back and forth movements of attention, the pitch-perfect diction, the inventiveness. Readers will be challenged-and rewarded.
-John Vernon
"In Widow's Dozen, Waldorf achieves something of a fiction trifecta: unexpected stories told in inventive language about unique and interesting characters. The stories take liberally from genres like suspense and sci-fi, but to categorize them seems beside the point: it's just good fiction. Leave your preconceptions behind and pick up the book."
-Shya Scanlon
This is a loosely thematically unified collection that ranges from mundane to science fiction to fantasy to magic realism. The style varies slightly at times but generally involves very long paragraphs which don't seem so long because of the cleanness of the prose ... a handsomely done little book ... I hope to see more of this author, and this imprint, in the future.
--Don D'Ammassa (at Critical Mass)
"Widow's Dozen .... ornery to the last, keeping the characters center-stage in even its most extravagant flights of fancy; and ultimately remaining as incomplete as it always promised.
Overall, Widow's Dozen is a difficult book to pin down. Its prose is often dense, its eye forever looking to one side of its subject; with the result that it can be ... elusive. Yet there's something in that very elusiveness, the sense of a world transformed and transforming, that wouldn't quite be the same if we could see it clearly. We need the gaps, after all."
- David Hebblethwaite (at Strange Horizon)
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