Cassandra at the Wedding

Dorothy Dodds Baker (1907 1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1907 and raised in California. After graduating from UCLA, she traveled in France, where she began a novel and, in 1930, married Howard Baker, a critic, professor, and editor. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA in French at UCLA, later teaching Latin at a private school. After having a few short stories published, Baker turned to writing full-time, despite, she would later claim, being seriously hampered by an abject admiration for Ernest Hemingway. In 1938, she published Young Man with a Horn (also available from NYRB Classics), a novel about a white jazz musician, which earned critical praise and eventually was made into a movie starring Kirk Douglas. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published Trio, a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbian relationship proved too scandalous for the times. Baker and her husband adapted Trio as a play in 1944, but it was quickly shut down because of protests. Baker died in 1968 of cancer.
 
Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.

Knowing, wise and a cracking read. Irish Independent

An important achievement intoxicating fun. Lillian Smith
 
[Baker s] ear for dialogue is acute, her prose immaculate this is a novel of exceptional quality. Times Literary Supplement
 
I whose usual bed time is ten o clock stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist. I can only think back to Young Man with a Horn, and be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker s continuing brilliance. Carson McCullers
 
Dorothy Baker s Cassandra at the Wedding (New York Review Books, 2004) is another novel in which it s hard not to be caught up from the very first page by the first person voice of the speaker. Originally published in 1962, this is the compulsively readable story of Cassandra s unwilling trip home to attend (or prevent) her twin sister Judith s wedding. She s one of those neurotic, intellegent women, trying to understand the direction her life has taken. Long out of print, this is just one of the wonderful titles (both fiction and non fiction) brought back to life by a publishing company whose mission, according to editor Edwin Frank, is to rescue some of the many truly remarkable works of literature that have had the misfortune of falling out of print. -- Nancy Pearl, The Beat, KUOW 94.9 FM Seattle NPR
 
Belongs with Salinger s Catcher in the Rye and McCullers s Member of the Wedding as a modern American classic. Georgia Hammick
 
A brilliantly told story remarkably subtle inexporably lucid. The New York Times