MICAH PERKS reads from her collection of short stories TRUE LOVE AND OTHER DREAMS OF MIRACULOUS ESCAPE with BEN LOORY

True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape (Outpost 19)

Magical and funny, profound and seductive, the linked stories in True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape explore the life-bending power of love. In these interwoven lives, ardent desire meets a keen sense of reality deep in the heart of progressive California. When Sadie opens a funky bookstore in Santa Cruz, she is swept off her feet by Daniel, a true-blue romantic—athletic, bookish, from Santiago, Chile. Their connection is heady and erotic, and it echoes through the love lives around them: from Harry Houdini’s first encounter with the widow Winchester to the threatening intimacy between a wife and her brother to a grumpy teenager who inspires her divorced parents. Years later, when Sadie and Daniel take an overdue trip to Paris, their blended family doesn't blend so well, sending them back to rediscover their roots. In these interconnected lives, the desire for passion is as strong as the desire to escape, and the terror of claustrophobic connection competes with the deepest human yearning. An intoxicating look at the complexity and simplicity of embracing and running from love. By the award-winning author of What Becomes Us.

Praise for True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape

"A writer whose stories are endearingly hard headed and tender hearted, and whose characters are so very alive that they practically escape off the page when you encounter them. This collection will cure what ails you."- Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and Pretty Monsters

“What an enticing cast of characters readers get to meet here! Micah Perks writes so well of love in many of its forms and stages, and she populates her book with such a memorable crew. No one is exempt from struggle and disappointment, and yet there is always a chance for transcendence, too."- Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Color Master

"The stories in True Love connect in the most satisfying way. You begin with a journalist who interviewed Harry Houdini about his night with lost souls in the Winchester House, a light story that gains weight from the six million Jews who did not escape. Then you have the chance to follow his granddaughter in her sad affair with a lover from Chile, a legacy. The stories are about escape in the deepest ways, from marriage and family and self and even from time and place, and the writing is beautiful, believable, disorienting. Sit down and watch the show, because I guarantee you don't know what's coming. . ."- David Vann, author of Bright Air Black and Aquarium

Micah Perks grew up in a log cabin on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness. She is the author of two other novels, What Becomes Us and We Are Gathered Here, and a memoir, Pagan Time. Her short stories and essays have won five Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, The Toast, OZY and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. Excerpts of What Becomes Us won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and The New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University and now lives with her family in Santa Cruz where she co-directs the creative writing program at UCSC.

Ben Loory is the author of the collections Tales of Falling and Flying and Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. His fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Electric Literature, and Fairy Tale Review, and been heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts.

Photo by Jennie Hettrick