Review of BookThe Devil shows up in a church basement, a repair guy gets to work on a girlbot, a skateboarder freezes mid-air, a prisoner stabbed in a Mexican jail, a tourist loses her identity down an outhouse hole, one memorable night in the slums of Rio, tryouts for a biblical porn movie - these are but a few of the wildly entertaining scenes included in the fifty-eight exceptional stories in the new collection, Animal Husband, by Nancy Margulies.Warning: do not attempt to predict the ending of any of these stories. They will fool you every time. Suggested Use: read one or two each evening before bed to insure bizarre dreamsAlternative uses: Give as gifts for no special occasion. Your friends will thank you.Read aloud to amuse your partner or friends."Animal Husband is filled with stories wild and wacky, quixotic and quirky. They are irreverent and dark, or resolute and buoyant. But mostly they are inventive and poignant, conveying a vision and a voice deeply grounded in the truth of human experience."- Chip B. Goldstein, EdD Dean, Academic Planning & Administration California Institute of Integral Studies
About the Author: Nancy Margulies experienced a number of lives before becoming an author of fiction. She was a psychologist, among the first ever to specialize in working with deaf people; a mural painter, the executive director of a large arts organization, a corporate consultant, a performer of one-woman theatrical shows. During her years in the the corporate world Margulies developed a visual note-taking system that became very popular and is now in use in many countries. As a result of her skill in creating these visual "maps" she traveled the globe, working with The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Maori tribes in New Zealand, Aboriginal tribes in Australia, President Clinton and his cabinet, Al Gore and hundreds of corporate leaders. A number of her non-fiction books and instructional videos, including the best-selling Mapping Inner Space, are available on Amazon. Her graphic novel, I'm Telling: One Girl's Story of Childhood Abuse is an excellent example of using images even more than words to convey complex emotions. In 2013 her Margulies' first work of fiction, a collection of very short stories, was published by Mel C. Thompson. Entitled Short Shorts: Sudden Fiction, the book received critical acclaim. In the year since its release Margulies compiled a new group of stories - Animal Husband - just as short, quirky and varied as the original collection. She illustrated the book as well. The stories in both books were written as improvisational exercises: given a one-word prompt Margulies spontaneously wrote an entire story in twelve minutes. On each occasion the story seemed to tell itself - while Margulies typed into her computer like someone taking dictation. While writing she had no idea where the story was going or how it would end, yet a complete story always emerged. As unlikely as this phenomenon might seem, it has been verified by the other women writers who witnessed this. Judy: For the Board Nancy will share share a couple of her stories and discuss the creative process she uses as an artist and as an author. We will then experience creating images and symbols to illustrate ideas from a story. It will be like being on a comic-book-making tag team.