Cradle Book: Stories & Fables

In Cradle Book, Craig Morgan Teicher has looked back at the long tradition of the fable, one of the oldest literary forms, and updated it for our era. These short fictions---most no more than a page or two---are set just outside of time, in an imagined world gone by or in one very much like our own, but haunted by portentous birds, lonesome trees, love-starved Gods, wolves or wolf-wannabes, sad and naughty children, wanderers, and fires and rocks with minds of their own. These are stories with poetry in their blood, or poems dressed up in fiction, fairy tales for grown-ups, though be careful if you read them before going to bed.

"Wrapped Lightly in Philosophy and whimsy and wisdom, here's a book to be savored, and revisited, and read aloud. Teicher is brewing some elegant magic here."---Aimee Bender

"Populated with Account-Keeping Birds, wolves whose `bite is like a breeze,' an invisible man, a nameless man, and children who find dust balls and `care for particular clumps as pets.' Teicher's stories are full of mystery and doubt and despair. These are fables with the hearts of haiku. Their conclusions, if they may even be termed as such, are full of question marks and quicksand and rabbit holes. A writer imagines writing a line that goes through the paper and into the horizon and writes, `I will follow that line until there is no next thing': a story can't settle on its subject; men die and become crows. With the lightest touch. Teicher prods at our human mysteries, cloaking a very real and compelx view of the world we live in through the language and staging of fairytale, diorama, and dream."---Matthea Harvly