Mr. and Mrs. Baby Deluxe Edition: And Other Stories - Art of the Story

Brief Description: Back in print in this deluxe edition, the former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet s only collection of short fiction, now part of the Ecco Art of the Story series. Imagine a writer who combines Woody Allen s sense of exaggeration his ability to extrapolate situations to their funniest extremes with the perspective and self-consciously elegant language of John Updike. That s right, you d have a creature who is never very likely to walk the face of the earth. But Strand, the prize-winning Canadian-born poet and professor of English at the University of Utah, comes close to that model. The stories in this first collection, originally printed in Vogue, The New Yorker, and Michigan Quarterly Review, vary widely. Yet several of them share a spirit of stubborn determination in the pursuit of idiosyncratic meanings of happiness. In one story a U. S. President noted mainly for reading Chekhov to his Cabinet and creating the National Museum of Weather, resigns. . . . Another tale is about a man who says he has been married five times and in love six, with none of the 11 experiences overlapping. Then there s Stanley R., the killer poet who murders his parents so he can write a poem about the experience. . . . . Few writers, though, can manage to make one of man s favorite pastimes futile longing seem to be so hilarious, touching and ultimately admirable as Strand does, in very succinct ways (People magazine)."

Contributor Bio:  Strand, Mark Mark Strand was born in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was the author of many books of poems, three volumes of translations, and one book of short stories. He received numerous honors and awards over his lifetime, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize (for Blizzard of One), the Bollingen Prize, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1990, he was appointed poet laureate of the United States. He died in November 2014, after being nominated for a National Book Award for Collected Poems.