A Floating World: Stories

With A FLOATING WORLD, Karen Best infuses mundane life with elements of the fantastic. From mermaids and sea serpents to deadly pin pricks and crying icons, these 13 stories stretch the boundaries of reality while exploring the search for answers where there are none.
Experience sorrow and disappointment as the title story, “A Floating World” inverts the “The Little Mermaid” through a woman born without feet whose relationship with a surgeon has unexpected consequences. Imagine the conflicted feelings of a seamstress who dissects wedding gowns when she is given a magical dress almost too beautiful to destroy in “Violets, Covered in Snow.” Explore abandonment, when, in “Eternity in Ice” a young girl's lover deserts her for a mysterious woman with blue hair, and the anticipation and wonder of a woman who travels to Iceland to admit her adultery, only to find herself enchanted by fields of floating garbage and tales of sea serpents. Revisit “Sleeping Beauty” with the story of a young man who drugs his girlfriend in an effort to act out the fairy tale. And follow a beautiful model who risks her life to retrieve a family artifact from Chernobyl in “Our Lady of Wormwood" as she is stalked by corrupt soldiers and mysterious shadows.
Best's final offering to the reader, her essay “Once Upon A Time,” wraps up the reader's journey by exploring the uses of Fairy Tale elements in modern fiction.
A FLOATING WORLD entrances with wonder, unexpected beauty and a passionate belief in the magical -- and haunts with longing, entrapment, and an unfulfilled search for meaning.