All Fall Down - Paperback

by Mary Caponegro (Author)

Mary Caponegro is one of the most imaginative, daring, serious adn playful writers alive. All Fall Down is her best book yet.--Jonathan Safran Foer

Mary Caponegro's headlong tales chronicle our generation's internal trajectories; she's robust, crude, drop-dead funny, tender, and heartbreaking as she navigates the tragicomedy of our middle age. She goes straight to the bottom of sex, love, romance, and all their travesties. The way David Foster Wallace used and claimed and forever changed footnotes, Caponegro has branded parentheses. She charts the 'oldly-wed game' of the long married using 'not a laugh but a cry-track.' Playful, but never shirking, Caponegro's stories are a deep balm.--Mona Simpson

In two novellas and four shorter tales of love and healing gone awry, we meet caregivers and lovers, muses and skydivers, mothers and minors--all headed toward "ninety mile-an-hour psychic crashes euphemistically referred to as epiphanies." As William Gass says, "The music of Mary Caponegro's stories is to the mouth what wine is." And through exuberant lyricism, remarkable characterization, and settings as elaborately detailed as any in Hollywood, these dramas of failure, resilience, and transformation linger long after the wine is gone.

The author of The Star Caf , Five Doubts, and The Complexities of Intimacy, Mary Caponegro lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches at Bard College.

Author Biography

Mary Caponegro's story collections include The Star Café and The Complexities of Intimacy. Her stories have been anthologized in The Anchor Book of New American Fiction, The Italian American Reader, and Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana. Born in Brooklyn, she has lived in Italy and now resides in the Hudson Valley where she teaches at Bard College.