Fiction. Dramatic pirouettes of relationships bring couples together and break them apart in a dance full of passion, love, contempt and boredom as characters in these stories struggle to find connection and meaning in a complicated and sometimes vacuous landscape of the 21st Century.
"Nava Renek's beautifully crafted stories in MATING IN CAPTIVITY cover every aspect of mating anyone could think of-between single lovers, married lovers, friends, the divorced, the soon-to-be divorced, best friends, former friends, former enemies, the childless, those with children, and those who obsessively desire children—people whose compulsive mulling and wondering why they do what they do leads them nowhere. Except maybe back to bed. Read MATING IN CAPTIVITY and you will surely recognize yourself."—Lynda Schor
"MATING IN CAPTIVITY's pitch-perfect stories of men and women, lust and disappointment, intoxication andbetrayal, contain a gorgeous emotional clarity that I associate with some of my favorite fiction writers: Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante, Alice McDermott. Renek's characters navigate cities and divorces, harbor secret affairs and unspoken yearnings, perform small acts of desperation or damage control, float their hope or regret on generous fingers of alcohol, and tread the perilous waters of what we so broadly call 'middle age.' These maturing lives are full of regressive habits as they circle the drain and earn each revelation the hard way, the second or third or tenth time around."—Karen Lillis
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA
Nava Renek is a writer, editor, and educator. Her short stories and essays can be found in literary magazines and websites such as The MacGuffin, ZONE 3, The Brooklyn Rail, mrbellersneighborhood, More.com, Respiro, among others. Her books include the novels SPIRITLAND (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002) and NO PERFECT WORDS (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and the short story collection MATING IN CAPTIVITY (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012). She is also the editor of WRECKAGE OF REASON: XXPERIMENTAL PROSE BY CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008). Renek lives in Brooklyn where she is program coordinator of the Women's Center at Brooklyn College/CUNY.