by Lauren Becker

Written in short, uncluttered sentences rich with dark complexities, these stories examine the human urge for connection. This is fiction grasping to determine whether life can "come with fewer qualifications and be less equivocal," where friendships are negotiated, love is one-sided, imagined, absent, or discovered, and where “going crazy is more subtle than you'd think."

PRAISE FOR IF I WOULD LEAVE MYSELF BEHIND:
"This collection of quick fiction is like a playlist of enthralling songs with every one a smash hit. The young women narrators who talk us through these living moments seem often to be courting or rejecting mates, but they are driven by deeper, more mysterious impulses, for meanings and answers to our deepest questions."
—James Robison, author of The Illustrator

"I've been reading Lauren Becker's stories for years and couldn't be happier to have them all collected in one place. Her stories inspire me to write, which is the highest compliment I can give to any writer."
—Mary Miller, author of Big World 

"I can’t explain the alchemy at work in a Lauren Becker story. Is it her voice, so real and immediate, so smooth in its resident sentences? Or is it something else—what happens beneath the accessible surface: how we might come to see we’re not reading; we’re being read? I’ve got no answers. But I’m ready to tell you this: no one at work in American fiction is doing what Becker does."
—Scott Garson, author of Is That You, John Wayne?

ABOUT LAUREN BECKER: 
Lauren Becker lives in Oakland, California. She has worked as an attorney, a health care policy analyst and advocate, a freelance writer, and a disability specialist. Her fiction has appeared at Tin House online, Hobart, the Los Angeles Review, Pedestal Magazine, Wigleaf, [PANK], and NANO Fiction. Her non-fiction has been featured on The Rumpusand The Nervous Breakdown. She is editor of the online literary journal, Corium Magazine.

PRESS:
Small Press Book Review
Grab the Lapels
Largehearted Boy
Midnight Breakfast
Two Birds One Stoned

PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Pages: 144
ISBN: 978-1940430072
Publication Date: June 2014