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GONE CRAZY OUT THERE

“The day he drove away for the last time he acted almost like it were no different from his going to the store and would be back soon. He stood at the back door looking at her as though there would be a next time. But after he closed the door gently behind him, pushing on it until the lock clicked, she stood in the house and knew there would be no next time.” In a powerful debut collection of seventeen stories exploring the unpredictable dynamics of love, fertility, and betrayal, Francesca Rochberg portrays with unnerving and unstinting intimacy the unraveling of a marriage. Set in the American West, from the California desert to British Columbia, the story of a couple is unveiled from many angles. Their story has one beginning but many endings and moves from realism to surrealism, leaving it to the reader to decide where the boundary, if any, lies between real and imagined. With a sensitive, bold, and analytic voice, Gone Crazy Out There offers a lyrical vision of the unfathomable mysteries of love and its fading.

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FRANCESCA ROCHBERG (Halton) (born Philadelphia) is an American Assyriologist, historian of science, and Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. She taught at the University of California, Riverside.