Amor and Psycho: Stories — Carolyn Cooke

From the author of "Daughters of the Revolution "and "The Bostons" (winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for fiction) come eleven stories about sex and death, violence and desire, love and madness, set in a vast American landscape that ranges from the largest private residence in Manhattan to the lush rain forests and marijuana farms of Northern California.

In "Francis Bacon," an aspiring writer learns essential lessons from an aging pornographer. In "The Snake," a restless Jungian analyst sheds one existence after another. In "The Boundary," a muralist falls in love with a troubled boy from the rez. In the surreal "She Bites," a man builds an architecturally distinguished doghouse as his wife slowly transforms. And in the transcendent, three-part title story, two best friends face their strange fates, linked by a determination to wrest meaning and coherence from lives spiraling out of control.

At once philosophical and compulsively readable, "Amor and Psycho" dives into our darkest spaces, confronting the absurdity, poetry and brutality of human existence.