The book, Bakken’s first collection of short stories, is primarily set in Bakken’s childhood home of Long Island, N.Y. The stories traverse the rocky landscape of “the closeness and strangeness of families, of the love between sisters, and the push and pull of lovers locked in a sexual passion they don’t always understand,” writes author and University of Houston Professor Daniel Stern.

            The Los Angeles Times describes Necessary Lies as “straightforward American fiction that works—making Necessary Lies a delight and something of a rare bird.” Publishers Weekly calls the book “an auspicious first outing” for first-time author Bakken.

Fiction writer and essayist Hilary Masters selected Necessary Lies for the Chandra Prize. He writes that “the voice in Necessary Lies and its speaker’s clarity of vision are implicit in almost every page. I hear this voice.” “Fully imagined, deeply felt, remarkable alert, and powerfully realized, the stories in Necessary Lies are all about finding the truth,” writes the late Frederick Busch, author of 27 books.

            “All stories of Long Island, it seems, gravitate towards or backwards to The Great Gatsby, with the confluence of desire and money,” writes Bakken. “For me, this collection of short stories is a way to interrogate Long Island’s promise (the promise of all suburbs perhaps) of “enough,” and its failure, the “never enough.”

             Bakken's stories have appeared recently in Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, and Shorewords: A Collection of American Women's Coastal Writings. She has received the Associated Writing Program’s Intro Journals Award for Fiction and the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Fellowship in Fiction.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Colgate University in 1994, Bakken attended the University of Houston and earned her MA and PhD in literature and creative writing. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.