Passion engulfs all in these wildly imaginative stories filled with "a textured beauty" (Aimee Bender).
Two lovers accidentally create a love potion while making a batch of Jell-O. An apartment is filled with water as an act of gravity-defying devotion to an acrobat. At turns blissful, absurd, sexy, and devastating, Marisa Matarazzo's stories don't just push the boundaries of love-they show how very boundless it is.
These interconnected shorts take love to a new level-another world, where a sex fever can sweep a town and where sex acts are performed tied to the raised mast of a sailboat. Falling into love, swimming, and drowning in it, the characters often exist in places where land and water collide and morph. A girl without hands is rescued from the sea by an oil-rig worker. A boy transplants a fish into the body of a menacing neighbor. A woman on the rebound has an unexpected encounter with an otherworldly water engineer. Fusing magical realism and fantasy with the heart of the here and now, Matarazzo has established a singular style. As she shifts effortlessly among startling plotlines and peculiar characters, she celebrates the fluid sorcery of love-in its ardor, its ugliness, all of its uncanny and magnificent manifestations, proclaiming love the most wondrous magic of all. Marisa Matarazzo is an author from Los Angeles, California. Her debut collection of interconnected short stories, Drenched, was published by Soft Skull Press. She is the daughter of abstract artist Francine Matarazzo and John H. Schumann, a researcher and professor of Applied Linguistics. She earned her BA from Yale, where she received the Wallace Prize for fiction writing, and the Arthur Willis Colton Scholarship. She was a two-time recipient of the Elmore A. Willets Prize for fiction. Earning her MFA from UC Irvine, she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship.
Matarazzo's works have been published in Faultline, Hobart, Fivechapters, Unstuck, as well as several other literary journals, and she has taught at UCLA Extension Writers' Program. Her work has also been performed by WordTheatre.
