Widow's Dozen
"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
Subtle lives—nostalgia lit, lovingly textured—bridge currents in catastrophe from impossible to remote to inevitable. A paean to Cheever's lost world before the storm: "the illusion of a country divided evenly between the lights of catastrophe and repose."
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 mw@marekwaldorf.com.
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