Tell It Slant | Larry Baker | $21.95 | 326p | ISBN 9781948509688 | Trade Paper | Coming November 1, 2025
Emily Sterling is dying of breast cancer. She is remembering, in a narrative that is as much novel as memoir, the three phases of her life: first, her childhood with adoring but eccentric parents, a time when Emily has to come to terms with the fact that she will never be as beautiful as her mother, ending with a trauma on her high school graduation night; second, her life between the ages of 20 to 30, in which she has a long-term love affair with her college teacher and his wife; and third, the rest of her life, in which she is a college teacher and then a first-time novelist at the age of fifty. The story ends in the garden of Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst.
Tell It Slant is an intimate account told by a dying woman desperate to keep talking, to stay alive. She is self-conscious about her choice of words, afraid of being a cliché. Emily’s life has been shaped by her mother Dawn, a woman who hears music nobody else hears; her best friend Dorothy, who tormented her when they were children; her high school teacher Miss Randall, who refuses to let her wallow in self-pity; Amy, the wife of the man she loves, a crippled woman whom Emily loves as much as she loves her husband; and finally, Dorothy’s daughter, Emily’s god-daughter, who becomes Emily’s only heir.
Praises:
“It’s thoughtful…it’s meditative…it’s got gorgeous gorgeous prose… It’s moving…it’s inspiring…and triumphant…go get it.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author, Days of Wonder
“Explores in depth the labyrinthine relationship between fiction and its writer’s life experiences, between truth and fact. How can we tell the truth about ourselves without betraying those around us? Slant communicates directly, unsparingly, with readers and writers alike.”
—Jincy Willett, author, The Writing Class
“Larry Baker gives voice to Emily Sterling, a woman facing death while reckoning with the complicated beauty of her life. Blending the intimacy of a memoir with the sweep of fiction, moving between memory and confession, the novel traces Emily’s journey from an eccentric childhood, through a decade-long love affair that defies convention, to her late triumph as a novelist. With prose both lyrical and unflinching, Baker invites readers into an experience that is as much about the act of remembering as it is about the inevitability of letting go.”
—Kali White VanBaale, author, The Monsters We Make and The Good Divide
“Read Tell It Slant. Read it for the evocative prose and for the irrepressible human spirit of Emmy Sterling. Read it for love, because love is on every page–her parents’ shimmering and lifelong spiritual connection, the adulterous love of her life, the deep care of her first mentor, the unswerving devotion of her truest friend–and every phase of Emmy’s life is told through the lenses of those loves. At the end, when time is short and she must choose what she wants us to know about her, Emmy chooses love every time.”
—Mary Anna Evans, author, The Dark Library
“Reminds us all over again what a good writer is: someone who can put words together to give us real lives lived on the page, and who remembers too that without conflict there is no story, and—one more thing—that writing is itself as important and necessary and as beautiful and terrifying an endeavor as it ever was. Emily Sterling and her story—first to last—matter to us, and this is because Larry Baker cares.”
—Bret Lott, author, Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land
“Quirky, wise and compelling, capturing the pace of life as it’s lived, equal parts drama and introspection, lingering in all the right places. Should be on every book club list.”
—Lettie Prell, author, The Three Lives of Sonata James
“Larry Baker’s artfully conceived and meticulously crafted novel, with the abiding spirit of Emily Dickinson hovering tantalizingly in the background, concerns itself with whatever ‘Truth’ may be. I can tell you that I love it. Entranced, even. It’s enigmatic, quirky, idiosyncratic…as moving and honest a human story as I’ve read in quite a while.” —Harry Owen, award-winning poet and author, Thicket: Shades from the Eastern Cape
“With Emmy Sterling Larry Baker has created a captivating narrator whose unique and authentic voice drew me in from start to finish. The story is told with a pleasing non-linearity linearity—telling it slant à la her namesake from Amherst—while Emmy reviews her life and unruly vocation in the moment as well as with hindsight and reflection. The secondary characters—Emmy’s parents, lover, best friends, mentor—are all flesh and blood even while they serve Emmy’s path to self-understanding. Tell It Slant is a page-turner in which character is paramount and poetry is always near.”
—Alan Michael Wilt, author, The Holy Family: A Novel