Winner of the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation Family Night cracks open one American family and shows us the values—and the dysfunctions—that make up the gothic attractions within it.At the center of this family stands a mysterious father figure, whom Margaret and her stepbrother, Cam, have never met: All they know is that he had been a model, the last Arrow Collar Man. Tracy, Margaret’s lover, ever eager to enrich his encyclopedic awareness of fixations, cajoles Margaret and Cam into a trip to find this absent father. The Arrow Collar Man as missing patriarch.Margaret, Cam, and Tracy—themselves haunted by recent divorces, by their own children, by their undecided instincts—set out in a powder blue Plymouth Duster on an unpredictable journey through the intimacies, obligations, and obsessions that bind us to each other. Family Night is an American family romance that neither Freud nor James Cain could have imagined.From Publishers WeeklyIn her fiction debut, Flook, the author of two poetry collections, produces finely wrought sentences, but her story falls flat. Heroine Margaret has, as the title implies, a dark relationship with her family, a tangle of step-siblings and ex-spouses. She also has a boyfriend named Tracy, a member of Sex Anonymous who engages in various forms of sexual congress with Margaret in full view of her relatives and ultimately prods her into committing incest with her stepbrother Cam. At Tracy's instigation, Margaret, Cam and Tracy seek out Cam's father, whom Cam has never met and of whom Cam knows only that he was once a model for Arrow Collars. Flook's style is frequently arresting; describing a car speeding dangerously through lanes of traffic, she writes: "It was a reverse wake, a terrible seam ripping upwards." But her version of the family romance--a catalogue of wayward deeds, odd sexual encounters, ugly secrets and uglier psychodramas--is more exhibitionistic than revelatory, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share her brittle characters' overwhelming interest in themselves. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. ReviewWinner of the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation“Family Night is a wild book, a savage sexual roller coaster, whose ultimate destination is a quirky juncture of memory and desire, a place where the pull of family and the pull of the erotic blur together. A powerful work, exquisitely written, it captures the dark, muddy world or the carnal unconscious as well as any novel I’ve read.”—Robert Boswell, author of Crooked Hearts “Family Night, Maria Flook’s debut as a novelist, reminds me of another notable debut, Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski’s first film. In both, one feels the immediate recognition of a unique sensibility; in both, the vision is mature, taut, edgy—and both are kept on the edge by an unremitting, underlying erotic current.”—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago “Maria Flook’s novel goes straight to the broken heart of an American family, where its wild children take shelter in each other. This is a book of desperate moves, by a writer gifted with a fierce wit and an amazingly sweet sensuality.”—Judith Grossman, author of Her Own Terms

In Open Water, Maria Flook explores the charged and eerie shoreline of Newport, Rhode Island, where Willis Pratt squanders his days running small cons. But his heart’s not in it—he’s obsessed with fishing boat tragedies from his childhood and with Holly, a pretty new neighbor who is charged with arson.Their romance is interrupted when Willis is called home to care for his dying step-mother, Rennie, whose biological son wants to place her in a care facility. Willis is determined to guarantee his stepmother the death she desires, but when he arrives, Rennie sees that it is he who needs caring for—Willis quickly gets hooked on her prescription morphine.This is Maria Flook’s natural ground, a harsh and sensual terrain where family debt and carnal knowledge intersect. A fierce wit and an unrelenting vision earned her first novel, Family Night, a Special Citation from the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and the New York Times praised it for “a spare, subtle, ethereal, and erotic style,” calling her gifts “extravagant and apparent on every page.”Open Water is a ringing confirmation of Maria Flook’s remarkable talent. Caught up in the novel’s unremitting current, its characters are propelled to a resolution that no one left on shore could have imagined.

Maria Flook’s novels have garnered the higher praise from writers and critics alike. The New York Times called her first novel “jolting,” her writing “ethereal, spare, and erotic.” Novelist E. Annie Proulx placed her “in the front ranks of new American writers.” You Have the Wrong Man is a powerful new work by this gifted writer. Flook’s stories enter the new sanctuaries where men and women connect, and in these eight unveiled liaisons sexual desire is presented in its deepest reaches and it 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 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 purist motives—not just to survive, but to survive for one another.