Sea Lovers: Selected Stories

Twelve extraordinary short stories from the award-winning, bestselling author of Property that explore human morality and our shared losses and joys, shifting from realism to myth, from the Louisiana bayou to the streets of Rome and beyond. - "Complex and wonderful.... A long, cool drink of water." --The New York Times Book Review

In these stories, Martin mines her three literary preoccupations--animals, artists, and metamorphoses--to unforgettable effect. In "The Consolation of Nature," a family battles a giant rat that has invaded their home. "The Open Door" follows an American poet in Rome, forced to choose between her lover and a world so new it takes her breath away. In "Et in Academic Ego," a seventeen-year-old bayou orphan falls in love with a centaur who transforms her life. And the title story conjures up a hideous mermaid who fatally seduces a fisherman. Sophisticated, incisive, deeply felt and always surprising, Sea Lovers showcases the enduring work of an indispensable writer.


About the Author
VALERIE MARTIN is the author of eleven novels, four collections of short fiction, and a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain's Orange Prize (for Property).