Cradle Book: Stories and Fables

Timeless yet timely and hopeful with a dark underbelly, these fables revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin. With a poet s mastery, Craig Morgan Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and the people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly behaving gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.

Craig Morgan Teicher is poetry editor of Publishers Weekly and a vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From The Brooklyn Rail:

The great challenge of literature is always changing, is as mutable as our striving and forgetful cultures- but always, it is some part of the author s job description to strip away our truisms and describe the gaping unknown. Teicher, in Cradle Book, sits somewhere on the other side, and transmits.

From Powell s Books:

Instead of the artifical clarity of the carefully orchestrated life evident in so much narrative realism, these pieces seek to explore what we don t understand, to open up questions that lead to more questions...Fables in the truest sense, these exquisite stories offer a sense of wonder even as they lead us deeper and deeper into the darkness of the unconscious.