Summary: Discover the stories of Crawford Award-winning author Christopher Barzak in his new collection, "Before and Afterlives." These are tales of relationships with unearthly domesticity and eeriness: a woman falls in love with a haunted house; a beached mermaid is substituted for a lost missing daughter; the imaginary friend of a murdered young woman stalks the streets of her small town; a teenage boy is afflicted with a disease that causes him to vanish; a father exploits his daughter’s talent for calling ghosts to her; and a wife leaves her husband and children to fulfill her obligations to a world from which she escaped. Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, "One for Sorrow," which has been made into the Sundance feature film "Jamie Marks is Dead." His next novel, "Wonders of the Invisible World," will be published by Knopf in 2015. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.
