How to Court Disaster takes us from wide expanses of open ocean to the enclosed spaces of grimy dive bars, echoing caves, and the holds of a musty ship. A grieving mother explores the secret chambers of a cave system. A stranded sailor joins the crew of a movie being filmed on a remote tropical island. A pregnant teenager finds herself on foot in the middle of a whiteout snowstorm with a stranger’s baby in her arms. A bed-and-breakfast owner struggles to rekindle her bond with the husband who no longer fully remembers their life together. Moving headlong into trouble, the characters in these stories discover they possess the inner resources they need to carry them beyond it: pluck, grit, fierceness, hope, and a growing sense of who they are becoming.
“How to Court Disaster is a brilliant and audacious collection of stories that careens from an ice fishing cabin to a subterranean river, from a shipwreck on a surreal island to a Filipino nightclub during the Vietnam War. At each stop, Kate Blakinger’s sharp, agile prose illuminates powerful insights for her characters as they navigate a broken world where ‘something horrible is always happening somewhere.’”—Jess Walter, judge, Iowa Short Fiction Award
“How to Court Disaster is a book of love stories—breathtaking, eye-opening, hair-raising love stories—not love as we usually encounter it in stories, but love among the ruins, love for the wounded and the wounding, love defined with searing wisdom as ‘feeling safe even when you're not.’ Love in real life, if you will. It’s one of the finest collections I’ve read this year and if you’re looking for grown-up love stories—world weary, gimlet eyed, bracingly frank and yet taut with passion—this book is for you.”—Peter Ho Davies, author, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
“Injury and endurance haunt Blakinger’s enthralling and calamitous stories. This is a superb collection, rife with moral ambiguities and the potential for chaos.”—Elizabeth McKenzie, author, The Dog of the North
“A live current of violence and physical exigency runs through these stories, whose tensile, sinuous sentences delight. Exquisitely sensitive to language and place and attuned to the world’s dangers, Blakinger writes in the tradition of Christine Schutt, Kathryn Scanlan, and Denis Johnson. She is a major new talent.”—Cara Blue Adams, author, You Never Get It Back, a New York Times Editors’ Choice
“How to Court Disaster is a beautiful collection of extreme, awe-inspiring environments where characters fearlessly hurtle past what they know and move toward lives about to be transformed. I loved reading this book.”—Marian Crotty, author, Near Strangers
