This extraordinarily polished and sophisticated story collection investigates the unaccountable ways in which literature and life entwine. In "Three Seaside Tales" a woman at a resort imagines herself in a Chekhov story only to succumb to banal everydayness, and in "Island Time" a young bride inexorably merges with Emma Bovary. Brennan's fictions position their readers at the edge of the known world, opening onto vistas of both erotic promise and ghastly beauty. The voices, youthful and aging, maniacal and restrained, represent our world's lost, scattering their words among surrealistic ruins, as though they have come to inhabit their own dreams. The lovely protagonist of "Saw" inexplicably maims herself with a chainsaw, literalizing in this violent impulse the self-destructive passion of all of Brennan's characters to actualize romance. These characters lead the reader through a charged, personal landscape of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic complexity. Their voices will continue to echo long after the book has been closed.

Karen Brennan holds a PhD from University of Arizona and an MFA from Goddard. She is a professor in the English department at University of Utah. She has published Wild Desire (University of Massachusetts Press,1990), a short fiction collection, which won the AWP Award in Fiction; Here on Earth (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), a poetry collection; and Being With Rachel: a Story of Memory and Survival (W.W. Norton, 2002), a memoir that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has had multiple Pushcart nominations and received a Pushcart Special Mention for "Cleaning House." She has also received the Sonora Review Fiction First Prize, Florence Hemley Schneider Prize in Women's Studies, PEN Syndicated Short Fiction Prize, and Senora Review Poetry First Prize.

Praise for Brennan's Wild Desire:

"The main characters in this fine collection of short stories are independent women who struggle to make it on their own in a world that seems to exist outside of, if not without, men."
--Publishers Weekly

"Amazing is indeed the response the reader comes away with from...this collection."
--American Book Review

"Misery always triumphs, Ms. Brennan warns in these stories, and it is a frosty triumph indeed." --New York Times Book Review