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LOVE

LOVE

$14.95Price

ISBN: 978-0-9668612-3-5

Pub Date: Spring 1999

Pages: 88


By Valerie Martin


Ms. Martin's trademarks: a preoccupation with the dark underside of life, a taste for disturbing, even macabre imagery . . . excursions into an unseen realm [of] strange and magical events . . . Martin possesses a sure storytelling gift, [an] ability to transform a myriad of specific details into larger, symbolic shapes.

—The New York Times


Few have written so surprisingly, so convincingly, as Valerie Martin about sexual obsession.

—Margaret Atwood


Little mad obsessions encased in precise prose make stories so startling you can't let go. Martin drags the psyche out of the dark cellars and closets into daylight. What happens is unsettling and weirdly beautiful in masochistic ways, like a gingerbread house with built-in gas ovens. Emotionally painful, iconoclastic, brilliant.

—Booklist


Powerful.

—Vogue, London


An impressive writer.

—Ann Tyler


Rich in perceptive prose . . . rich in probing character.

—The Chicago Tribune


Valerie Martin is fascinating, tantalizing . . . contemporary and extraordinary.

—The Boston Globe


    The generosity of Martin's understanding opens every character to the full, astounding range of human possibility. Her revelations build mesmerizing excitement, a surprising kindness, and an unexpected sanity in the darkness.

    —Katherine Dunn, The Washington Post Book World


    A formidable writer in a class by herself . . . With her clear and penetrating gaze, Martin looks at the world and sees its horrors and contradictions, its terrifying beauty, and renders her insights through the characters of memorable women. She is a disturbing, provocative writer of risky and dangerous fiction.

    —The Times-Picayune, New Orleans


    Martin may well prove to be one of the important American writers of her generation.

    —Daily News, Los Angeles


    Valerie Martin is one of those rare writers who understands the loss of traditional motives and order, but in her work never yields to the jumbled directionless excesses that tempt the modern fictioneer. Her stories are tight, bound with a tension that is as delicate as it is strong. And they are disturbing, unequivocal—a voice that will stay with you for a long time.

    —Small Press Book Club


    Valerie Martin, an American novelist and short story writer, was born in Sedalia, Missouri in 1948, but spent most of her childhood and young adult life in New Orleans. She attended the University of New Orleans and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she received an MFA in Creative Writing. Ms. Martin has taught at the University of New Orleans, New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Mt. Holyoke College.

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