"The Short Fall is a rhetorical triumph, a novel about the presidency built architecturally on language and skyscraper sentences, an impressive, high flying debut."—Jonathan Baumbach
"Possessed of great verve and tremendous inventive muscle, Marek Waldorf offers style and substance to spare in this terrific debut. Calvino's millennial qualities are all here: but especially quickness and lightness and lots of pleasurable multiplicity. I got hits, in reading The Short Fall—an experience, in short, that I highly recommend—of early, rollicking Javier Marias, but also of Gilbert Sorrentino and Harry Mathews too."—Laird Hunt
A speechwriter shot during a botched assassination starts to recover powers of speech along with pieced-together memories of the campaign he served and the candidate he helped make president of a "bankrupt and volatile" republic. The more the narrator remembers the more he suspects that he was the target. A frenzied, lyrical, farcical, anguished monologue on the personal and political.
Raymond Chandler once wrote in a letter, "It doesn't matter a damn what a novel is about. The only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words."
Marek Waldorf does magic with words in The Short Fall, a multilevel debut novel about a paralyzed speechwriter's relationship to his client, a charismatic presidential candidate named Vince Talbot, and about his own relationship to the written word. The novel, filled with lively effusions of wit and unexpected humor, is at once a non-ideological fly-on-the-wall exposé of how campaigns are run and a meditation on writing and creative embellishment. It's an achronological story of recovery, one that emerges slowly like an image on a Polaroid photograph.
Marek Waldorf was born in Washington, DC. His father was in the Foreign Service and Marek lived with his family in Idi Amin's Uganda, coup-wracked Thailand, England and Lesotho. While he was in the United States he lived in Binghampton, NY.
Waldorf studied Philosophy at Harvard. After a year in grad-school Waldorf moved to San Francisco where he appeared in Jon Moritsugu's Hippy Porn (1991) which ran at Action Christine Cinema for over a year.
Waldorf is the author of Widow's Dozen, a collection of stories forthcoming from Turtle Point Press in 2014. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Recorder, where he served as Fiction Editor and then Editor-at-Large. He works as a grant-writer (most recently for Brooklyn Public Library and Girls Write Now) and lives in Brooklyn.
