Love Songs for the Quarantined — K.L. Cook

Fiction. K. L. Cook's award-winning LOVE SONGS FOR THE QUARANTINED illuminates the unexpected, the unforeseen--the moments when, without warning, everything changes. A surprise visit from the infamous Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow disturbs a thirteen-year boy's routine--and future. A fortune teller's ominous predictions unsettle two brothers during their first visit to the Cotton Bowl. Whooping cough quarantines a family and reminds them of their precarious history. A miniscule filament of hot steel lodges in a man's eye and irrevocably alters the course of his marriage. Sixteen love songs about the transformations that await us--whether we're ready or not."As the title suggests, these are songs for people entrapped by love. Sometimes it's a happy entrapment, but more often it's unhappy, and most of the time just inscrutable in the way that love can be. These stories are plain spoken and fine, not the least of which is the lead story, where a dying man with a deformity is revisited by his cousin, Clyde Barrow...yes, of Bonnie and Clyde fame...and the protagonist takes a Kodak picture of woundings upon woundings. The stories are also savvy and compelling. K. L. Cook knows the landscape of love in modern times perfectly."--John Keeble"Reading K. L. Cook's LOVE SONGS FOR THE QUARANTINED, I had the giddy feeling I was privy to a secret, that somehow I was being let in on a great, hidden story that few were lucky to read, and as I continued to the next story and the next, I had the same remarkable feeling. This is a lucid and luminous collection--an extraordinary book. K. L. Cook works a rare magic."--Debra Magpie Earling