How to Court Disaster

"How to Court Disaster is a brilliant and audacious collection of stories that careens from an ice fishing cabin to a subterranean river, from a shipwreck on a surreal island to a Filipino nightclub during the Vietnam War. At each stop, Kate Blakinger's sharp, agile prose illuminates powerful insights for her characters as they navigate a broken world where 'something horrible is always happening somewhere.'" -- Jess Walter, judge, Iowa Short Fiction Award

How to Court Disaster takes us from wide expanses of open ocean to the enclosed spaces of grimy dive bars, echoing caves, and the holds of a musty ship. A grieving mother explores the secret chambers of a cave system. A stranded sailor joins the crew of a movie being filmed on a remote tropical island. A pregnant teenager finds herself on foot in the middle of a whiteout snowstorm with a stranger's baby in her arms. A bed-and-breakfast owner struggles to rekindle her bond with the husband who no longer fully remembers their life together. Moving headlong into trouble, the characters in these stories discover they possess the inner resources they need to carry them beyond it: pluck, grit, fierceness, hope, and a growing sense of who they are becoming.

Kate Blakinger's stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Catamaran, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, and The Iowa Review, among others. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.