You Have the Wrong Man: Stories

by Maria Flook

Flook's stories enter the raw sanctuaries where men and women connect, and in these eight unveiled liaisons sexual desire is presented in its deepest reaches and its full human scale. In "Rhode Island Fish Company" a woman's maternal instincts run amok and kindle a startling betrayal; in "Prince of Motown" a household enters a crazed bereavement when Marvin Gaye is murdered; in "Lane" a man volunteers a point-by-point confession of threatening, bitter lust. These are only a few of the edgy coercions between men and women in stories that illuminate the moral tests and erotic pressures that tear up couples and unhinge families.
In writing that is both psychologically precise and funny, relationships are worn down by carnal debts, hardships, and cold-blooded consummations, but these characters find reprieve as Flook evokes their purest motives - not just to survive, but to survive for one another.

241 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 1996

About the author

Maria Flook is the author of the novels Family Night (which received a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation) and Open Water, as well as a collection of stories, You Have the Wrong Man, and a memoir, My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New Criterion, TriQuarterly, and More Magazine among others. She is a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award recipient, and is currently Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston. More information about Maria Flook can be found at www.mariaflook.net.