The Answer

by Mary Morris, Halimah Marcus (Foreword)

“The night he tried to strangle his wife, Daniel Clay was in the process of buying a Slovakian goldmine.” So opens “The Answer” by Mary Morris, a quiet, sun-soaked story of failure and self-delusion. Daniel, a disgraced financier, is a certain kind of protected person who believes his demons can be exorcised by quality of life control. With “The Answer,” Mary Morris humanizes the term “unreliable narrator,” which, when held up against a complex and fully drawn character such as Daniel, seems clinical. We ourselves are unreliable. So are our intimates. To tell a story is not an exercise in reliability. To tell a story is to navigate blind spots, those affectless pockets, and still manage to bring Daniel to “where he’d been going all along.”

About the Author:

Mary Morris is the author of fourteen books—six novels, three collections of short stories, and four travel memoirs, including The River Queen. Recently her short stories have appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and Narrative. “The Answer” is part of a new collection of connected stories. The recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, Morris teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her new novel, The Jazz Palace, set in Chicago during the Jazz Age will be published in the spring of 2015 by Knopf Doubleday. For more information visit her website.

About Electric Literature:

Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction. Stay connected with us through our eNewsletter (where you can win weekly prizes), Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.

28 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 15, 2014

About the author

I was born in Chicago and, though I have lived in New York for many years, my roots are still in the Midwest and many of my stories are set there. As a writer my closest influences are Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I travel as much as I can and travel fuels everything I do. When I travel, I keep extensive journals which are handwritten and include watercolors, collage as well as text. All my writing begins in these journals. I tend to move between fiction and nonfiction. I spent seventeen years working on my last novel, The Jazz Palace. I think I learned a lot writing that book because the next one only took three years., Gateway to the Moon. Gateway which will be out in March 2018 is historical fiction about the secret Jews of New Mexico. I am also working on my fifth travel memoir about my travels alone. This one is about looking for tigers.