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Tales to Tell |
| These stories are not so much about lost innocence as about innocence forfeited. The tales open with Jack Streught as a little boy in the back seat of an old jalopy and close with him as a young man in the rear section of a jet airliner. Due to errors in navigation he tries to travel through his own clay to reach a stairway to heaven. In Jack's fitful and self absorbed shindig, any joyful quickstep forward seems always followed by a clumsy tumble that is two steps back. |
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Afraid of The Dark... |
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| ...is a story about a young man named Ted Kafka and his travels through the post-Watergate Wild West. It is a sensitive exploration to the fringes of differing existences - that of making a living, that of the New Publishing Movement, and those of indistinct love and turbulent friendships. It also asks the question as to which is the more important: the destination or the journey... |
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Lillie Seline's Confession |
| The jury on Lillie Seline is still out. You could cite the triangle she falls into with the stubborn Dariel Baker and the illusive Jeff Turnbull as being unavoidable fallout left behind by our most recent wave of women's activism. You could even make the argument that, naturally, if there are such things as anti-heros, sooner or later anti-heroess' were bound to happen along too. Or, maybe the only real mark against Lillie is that she's clumsily trespassed into one of the few exclusive men's clubs still remaining - one whose secret taboo rite is that of making morality. |
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A Vacation From Worry |
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| The place is the cityscape of Megalopolis. The time is the beginning of the eighth decade of this current century. The dalliances we observe are those of a small group of fair-weather friends masquerading as chosen leaders. We witness, too, a crowded merry-go-round full of stacked-together people reaching out with anxious fingers to touch any sweet plum or shiny ring that passes by. And, in the distance, we see the outlines of an old fashioned scandal and a couple of nipped-in-the-bud romances sketched in for good measure. |
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Alms at Beautiful Gate |
| These are stories about the
domestic life of oddballs. In Alms at Beautiful Gate an
ex-hero is kidnapped but no one will ransom him. A Wise Man Mad
is a story about an only slightly off-balance poor soul who has a
terrorist for a neighbor and who becomes the target of a misdirected
police hunt. In A Season for Poor Choices an ex-convict
tries to overcome his addiction to robbing grocery stores.
The point in these stark and sparsely written stories is about options running out, where the difficulty is not that the problems keep repeating themselves, but that the solutions do. |
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