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Lost Lake: Stories
Set in a tiny Czech community on the shores of Lost Lake, these stories chronicle three generations of men and women under the spell of a landscape with a powerful history. Mark Slouka explores both the quiet glory of the natural world and the mysterious motions of the human spirit.
A New York Times Notable Book
A California Book Award Silver Medalist for Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book
A California Book Award Silver Medalist for Fiction
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
4 people are currently reading
423 people want to read
About the author
Mark Slouka
18 books110 followersMark Slouka most recent books are the story collection All That Is Left Is All That Matters, the memoir Nobody’s Son, and the award-winning novel Brewster. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Prague.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 6, 2020
This review comes with a warning. Lost Lake has two stories that are quite brutal and difficult to read. One really stopped me in my tracks and for the author to experience what he saw (and I’m suspecting he did as a child) must have been shocking. I put the book aside for quite a while but the beautiful, lyrical writing drew me back.
“Set on the shores of Lost Lake, in upstate New York, these twelve tales tell of three generations of the small Czech community who have their their homes there, beside the water’s edge.”
The story Genesis is how the lake, man made, came to be. “Innocent enough in conception - a forty acre fishing hole with a float like a wooden rivet at its centre - Colby’s lake was the start of something, of many things, he could never have anticipated. Like a water hole on the savanna, like the original garden, bloodless and pure, it soon drew unexpected guests, and in this it was typical of all the things men dream and do. Dismantling one well, he erected, another, flooding one world, he exposed a dozen more. It could not have been otherwise.”
“Who among us hasn’t noticed it, the strange doubling of forms and faces - the echo in the world? The waves in rock, the veins in leaves, the ghostly flowerings of frost. As though god, deep in his labours, had suddenly run out of ideas, or, perhaps, surprised by the loneliness of his creation, had set out, in the eleventh hour, to stitch the world together: the sound of wind to the sound of water, the ruffling of field to the ruffling of fur, the memories of the living to the hopes of the dead.”
Captivating.
“Set on the shores of Lost Lake, in upstate New York, these twelve tales tell of three generations of the small Czech community who have their their homes there, beside the water’s edge.”
The story Genesis is how the lake, man made, came to be. “Innocent enough in conception - a forty acre fishing hole with a float like a wooden rivet at its centre - Colby’s lake was the start of something, of many things, he could never have anticipated. Like a water hole on the savanna, like the original garden, bloodless and pure, it soon drew unexpected guests, and in this it was typical of all the things men dream and do. Dismantling one well, he erected, another, flooding one world, he exposed a dozen more. It could not have been otherwise.”
“Who among us hasn’t noticed it, the strange doubling of forms and faces - the echo in the world? The waves in rock, the veins in leaves, the ghostly flowerings of frost. As though god, deep in his labours, had suddenly run out of ideas, or, perhaps, surprised by the loneliness of his creation, had set out, in the eleventh hour, to stitch the world together: the sound of wind to the sound of water, the ruffling of field to the ruffling of fur, the memories of the living to the hopes of the dead.”
Captivating.
December 14, 2018
Born in New York, the immigrants’ son, I knew the low sky and the slate-red roofs of Brno and Prague long before I saw them, heard the silence of fields, cultivated since Rome, long before I stumbled in their furrows, smelled the smell of courtyards at dusk—the wet-sand smell of lumber and coal—long before I leaned out of actual windows, a foreigner smoking a cigarette, recalling a place I’d never seen.
The first paradox I remember being overwhelmed by, when I became a temporary immigrant in Virginia back in the mid-‘80s, was that Americans were more proud of their country than any other people I had encountered, however, One would not engage in conversation with any American for many minutes without them bringing the conversation to the point of where their ancestors had emigrated from. Mark Slouka’s first published work of fiction – Lost Lake (1998) – is a fine illustration of this paradox. It would be difficult for me to think of another book that I have read in recent years closer in spirit, style and subject matter to Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and Norman Maclean than this little book. Yet, while Slouka’s pedigree as a writer harks back to some of the giants of “Americana,” most of his characters draw their line of ancestry back to the old world, and in particular that of Bohemia and Moravia.
The eponymous Lost Lake is a collection of 23 small summer cabins built on the banks of an artificial lake sometime shortly after the Spanish-American war by a veteran, who created the place, as he was tired of walking to and from the nearest real lake in order to do his fishing. The whole colorful tale is told early on in the book by the local store owner to the narrator’s father, whose Czech name “Mostovsky” invariably and repeatedly is mis-pronounced “Mostiky.” All of the tales are somehow linked to the small (summer) community of Lost Lake, and most of them in some way reflect back on the experiences and lives lived in Czechoslovakia, before coming across the Atlantic. In the first few stories of the book, the narrator is still a child, spending summers with his parents at the lake, fishing and swimming, watching the adult world around him without complete comprehension. Later in the book, he has become a grown man, with children of his own, still at times fishing, and reflecting on people who have passed out of his life, and what has become of them. And, by the end of the book, we are left to assume that the narrator is now into middle-age, visiting the lake again after an absence of many years, possibly on his own.
In this first slim book of stories, as in his novel “The Visible World” published 10 years later in 2008, and in his most recent collection of stories “All That is Left is All That Matters" (2018), Slouka’s storytelling flows smoothly, lyrical, nostalgic, and wise to the world. He often sums up the experience of a lifetime in a sentence or two. The lake community too, although not necessarily “Lost Lake,” figures in all three books. There are even characters that recur in his latest book, which we already meet in Lost Lake. It will be interesting to see in future books, if Slouka will continue to develop this image of the lake as a unifying and recurring image. As short story collections go, this is a truly fine book with a nice sense of unity.
The first paradox I remember being overwhelmed by, when I became a temporary immigrant in Virginia back in the mid-‘80s, was that Americans were more proud of their country than any other people I had encountered, however, One would not engage in conversation with any American for many minutes without them bringing the conversation to the point of where their ancestors had emigrated from. Mark Slouka’s first published work of fiction – Lost Lake (1998) – is a fine illustration of this paradox. It would be difficult for me to think of another book that I have read in recent years closer in spirit, style and subject matter to Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and Norman Maclean than this little book. Yet, while Slouka’s pedigree as a writer harks back to some of the giants of “Americana,” most of his characters draw their line of ancestry back to the old world, and in particular that of Bohemia and Moravia.
The eponymous Lost Lake is a collection of 23 small summer cabins built on the banks of an artificial lake sometime shortly after the Spanish-American war by a veteran, who created the place, as he was tired of walking to and from the nearest real lake in order to do his fishing. The whole colorful tale is told early on in the book by the local store owner to the narrator’s father, whose Czech name “Mostovsky” invariably and repeatedly is mis-pronounced “Mostiky.” All of the tales are somehow linked to the small (summer) community of Lost Lake, and most of them in some way reflect back on the experiences and lives lived in Czechoslovakia, before coming across the Atlantic. In the first few stories of the book, the narrator is still a child, spending summers with his parents at the lake, fishing and swimming, watching the adult world around him without complete comprehension. Later in the book, he has become a grown man, with children of his own, still at times fishing, and reflecting on people who have passed out of his life, and what has become of them. And, by the end of the book, we are left to assume that the narrator is now into middle-age, visiting the lake again after an absence of many years, possibly on his own.
In this first slim book of stories, as in his novel “The Visible World” published 10 years later in 2008, and in his most recent collection of stories “All That is Left is All That Matters" (2018), Slouka’s storytelling flows smoothly, lyrical, nostalgic, and wise to the world. He often sums up the experience of a lifetime in a sentence or two. The lake community too, although not necessarily “Lost Lake,” figures in all three books. There are even characters that recur in his latest book, which we already meet in Lost Lake. It will be interesting to see in future books, if Slouka will continue to develop this image of the lake as a unifying and recurring image. As short story collections go, this is a truly fine book with a nice sense of unity.
October 28, 2015
Too much bla-bla-blah.
It takes about a minute and a half to read, so equally it deserves only a minute and a half review.
This would be a good memoir for one's own life book, but certainly nothing worth publishing.
Fishing and camping and nature; and nature and camping and fishing, without a lot of insight or greater perceptions.
I look to art to be moved: make me think, make me laugh, make me cry, make me angry ... but don't ever, ever make me bored.
Too much bla-bla-blah. Emphasis on "blah".
It takes about a minute and a half to read, so equally it deserves only a minute and a half review.
This would be a good memoir for one's own life book, but certainly nothing worth publishing.
Fishing and camping and nature; and nature and camping and fishing, without a lot of insight or greater perceptions.
I look to art to be moved: make me think, make me laugh, make me cry, make me angry ... but don't ever, ever make me bored.
Too much bla-bla-blah. Emphasis on "blah".
December 30, 2020
I am particularly fond of linked short stories, especially beautifully written ones. Mostly Czech residents live near a lake community in update New York. Some year round; others for just the summer. There is a lot about the lake--the weather, the fishing, the danger. What a writer!
August 1, 2010
This is a collection of short stories about a Czech boy's time in his family's lake cabin in upstate New York. The characters are interesting, but the big draw for me is Slouka's language. Beautiful, lyrical. You may lack interest in the subject if you have no connection to fishing and living on a lake, unless, of course, you are a word freak like Frounfelter.
November 1, 2017
Lost Lake: Stories by Mark Slouka is a recommended collection of twelve interconnected stories set in a small Czech community on the shores of Lost Lake.
The stories are all wonderfully descriptive and mainly about fishing. The narrator is a middle-aged man, Mostovsky, who is looking back at his experiences at the family's cabin on Lost Lake in upstate New York and the largely Czech community who vacationed there. As with many childhood memories, many of these have a dream-like nostalgic quality to them. Along with the good memories are other memories that are less than beautiful or not completely understood until viewed at as an adult. Strong emotions from the memories are acknowledged, as are the subtleties among the residents there that may be noticed by a child, but, again, only understood as an adult.
The strength in this collection and the reason to read it is the beautiful writing, which is rich in its comparisons and images. That said, this isn't a collection where a whole lot of action takes place or a clear plot is developed. The stories jump back and forth in time as memories and recollections are shared. There are prose includes descriptions of the nature surrounding the lake in the stories and talk about fishing. A whole lot of talk about fishing. In the end it was all the discussion of fishing that overwhelmed me and began to detract from the quality of the writing.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.
The stories are all wonderfully descriptive and mainly about fishing. The narrator is a middle-aged man, Mostovsky, who is looking back at his experiences at the family's cabin on Lost Lake in upstate New York and the largely Czech community who vacationed there. As with many childhood memories, many of these have a dream-like nostalgic quality to them. Along with the good memories are other memories that are less than beautiful or not completely understood until viewed at as an adult. Strong emotions from the memories are acknowledged, as are the subtleties among the residents there that may be noticed by a child, but, again, only understood as an adult.
The strength in this collection and the reason to read it is the beautiful writing, which is rich in its comparisons and images. That said, this isn't a collection where a whole lot of action takes place or a clear plot is developed. The stories jump back and forth in time as memories and recollections are shared. There are prose includes descriptions of the nature surrounding the lake in the stories and talk about fishing. A whole lot of talk about fishing. In the end it was all the discussion of fishing that overwhelmed me and began to detract from the quality of the writing.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.
November 22, 2019
Didn't finish. Just wasn't the book for me.
June 8, 2023
A lovely little book. Beautiful imagery and language.
June 3, 2024
There are some really gorgeous moments in these intertwined stories. I love the movement of water throughout, but I found myself getting bored with some of the fishing. There is a lot of fishing.
July 6, 2013
An interesting read with a lot of lessons to be found at the end of each short story. Though I'm not big on the short story format, this books, while made up of short stories, is all seemingly told by the same person which makes it more cohesive.
August 2, 2007
A beautifully written book of loosely linked stories that plumb the depth and breadth of human experience. These stories are hard to forget.
Want to read
June 22, 2010signed & inscribed by author
July 29, 2011
Short stories. Lyrical prose. Memory pieces.
August 27, 2016
I could not get into this book - sorry not for me.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews