BASS 1998

ISBN: 978-1-938900-35-8
Publication date: Spring 2020
52 pages, 5” x 7”
Read Press Release (PDF)

SYNOPSIS

EXCERPT

We enter for free because we are in uniform. We are late; the woman in the booth says there are no empty seats. But in the end she lets us in.

Our friends have already arrived. They are seated in the balcony. They could pass for an elderly couple with season tickets, peacefully married though childless, a summer home in the south of France.

We sit on the stairs, on opposite sides of the aisle. I feel homeless. My shirt untucked, my hair untied, greasy. Your pants torn, one leg escaped from your boot. We are terrible soldiers.

The music has already started. I am unprepared. I don’t even know what he is playing.

Tomorrow, on our lunch break, I will drive you to the psychiatrist’s office. In my white Fiat Tempra. The engine has been overheating, the needle is always on red. My air conditioner is broken and you cannot stand the heat. You compete with the car over who will die first before we get there. I stop constantly to fill the tank with water.

I will drive you there in secret. When we return to the base, people will ask us where we were. We will say we went to get lunch in town. We know how to keep a secret. We all do, it is our job.

I do not know what he is playing. Later I will learn that it was something by Schubert, but I will never remember what it was exactly. The concert hall is still, we are all trapped. The music wraps its fingers around my throat and squeezes.

I wish I could look at you, because only you understand this. But you will refuse to look back.

PRAISE

“As the narrator ponders…’It’s no secret that if you read something closely enough, for long enough, you can find just about anything you want to see in it.’ The ‘anything’s we find in these distilled narratives include ghosts, hostels, captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, populist financial advisor Suze Orman, unwilling blowjobs, mortality, and godlike glimpses into a future that includes Obama and Elon Musk—all held together by a compelling authorial voice that creates the impression of a fractured novel or memoir, as if there were a difference between the two. By turns tragic and hilarious, BASS captured the sadness behind our  best efforts; though all dreams eventually collapse, Karen Marron’s characters will never stop dreaming.”

–DODIE BELLAMY

AUTHOR

Karen Marron lives and writes in Tel Aviv. She is a creative nonfiction editor and the production editor of The Ilanot Review, and has an MA in creative writing from the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. Her writing has appeared in The Bellingham Review, Entropy, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Unbroken Journal, and Hobart.

DESIGNER

Book design by Diana Arterian.