How well she writes about class, social and political eras. I am reminded of Dawn Powell and Edith Wharton. There are characters and scenes, situations so specifically and brilliantly drawn they must be "true." We know Babs and Mr. Rich, Tom and the weeping French school-mistress. So interwoven are their contradictions and questions this book seems infinitely longer than it is. Lucia Berlin
Martha King was born in Virginia in 1937. She attended Black Mountain College in the summer of 1955 and married the painter Basil King in 1958. She began writing in the late 1960s, after the birth of their two daughters.
Living in Brooklyn since 1968, King produced 31 issues of the free zine Giants Play Well in the Drizzle in the late 1980s. She has worked as an editor in mainstream book publishing, for Poets & Writers, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, from which she retired in September 2011. She blogs at www.basilking.net.
Her collections of short stories include North & South (2007), Separate Parts (2002), and Little Tales of Family and War (1999). Other stories have been anthologized in Fiction from the Rail and The Wreckage of Reason. A collection of her poetry, Imperfect Fit, was published in 2004. Currently, King is at work on a memoir, Outside Inside, chapters of which have appeared in Jacket #40 online, Bombay Gin, Blaze Vox and New York Stories.
