Crash and Tell

Sometimes wildly funny, yet often serious, jarringly uncanny yet realistic, the stories in Lori Baker's Crash & Tell seem to come from a different time and place. In her darkly whimsical world, Baker plays with a variety of narrative voices and styles, skillfully treading the line between traditional storytelling and the literary avant-garde. The interconnected stories provide a revealing account of women's lives, exploring the dark side of romance and the workplace. Laced with the surreal, the familiar neighborhoods of our lives grow strange through the lens of memory and murder.

From the comical re-imagining of Jane Goodall's life among the apes - told from the eyes of Jane as a debutante escapee - to a professional research subject who outwits a cunning psychiatrist; a photographer who must come to grips with a peculiar family obsession; a bored wife on vacation experiencing an unexpected seaside interlude with an oddly menacing dentist; and a car crash that leads to the most unromantic of romances - the alienated suburbanites of these tales value memories (and ghosts) over people.