The Marriage of Sticks (32 page)

Authors: Jonathan Carroll

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Horror, #Contemporary

After publishing
Voice of Our Shadow
(1983), Carroll wrote
Bones of the Moon
(1987), which touched on his childhood experience with Hollywood and became the first installment of the loosely connected Answered Prayers sextet. He continued the series with
Sleeping in Flame
(1988) and
A Child Across the Sky
(1989), and ended it with
From the Teeth of Angels
(1993).

His book
Outside the Dog Museum
(1991) was named the best novel of the year by the British Fantasy Society, and has proven to be one of Carroll’s most popular works, drawing favorable comparisons to
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Since then he has written the Crane’s View trilogy,
Glass Soup
(2005), and
The Ghost in Love
(2008). His short stories have been collected in
The Panic Hand
(1995) and
The Woman Who Married a Cloud
(2012).

Carroll’s novels have long been popular in Europe, most notably in Poland, where, Carroll has said, his books sell “like free sex.” He continues to live and write in Vienna.

Jonathan Carroll, at age nine, in New York, where he spent part of his childhood.

A Carroll family Christmas. Brother David Carroll and father Sidney Carroll watch as Jonathan's other brother, Steve Reich, composes an impromptu song.

Carroll married Beverly Schreiner the day he graduated from Rutgers University in 1970.

Carroll strolls the University of Virginia campus in 1972, with his brother David.

Carroll in Pacific, Missouri, in 1973. Pacific inspired the fictional town of Galen, the setting of his first novel,
The Land of Laughs
.

Carroll at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1995. (Photo courtesy of Jo Pesendorfer.)

Carroll sits with his wife, Beverly, his son, Ryder, and the family's dog, Nails. (Photo courtesy of Bela Borsodi.)

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint the following:

Lines from the poem “Without Knocking” by Attila József, translated by John Bátki, from
Winter Night
. Copyright © 1997 by John Bátki. Reprinted by permission of Oberlin college Press.

cover design by Elizabeth Connor

978-1-4532-6493-5

This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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