The seven stories in this collection are tied together by a common setting: New York City and its suburbs; and by a common theme: the power of love and its impact on the human condition.
This Metropolitan area is blessed with and cursed by vast socio-economic and cultural disparities which greatly influence the way people live, think, feel and react. Love runs through the stories as the single most important motivating force, but that love takes a multitude of forms, and manifests in hugely different ways from story to story and character to character.
We see love and its loss as a powerful force for good in the world, for redemption, and for heightened awareness in the individual. But we also see it as a destructive, dislocating, dystonic, or frightening force. In each story, we see the flip side of love: the impact of its loss, which is either ultimately positive or devastatingly negative. We see love lifting some characters to great heights of joy and plunging others into depths of sorrow, despair, and self-destruction. We see how love can expand one character’s worldview while causing other characters to collapse into themselves or run for cover into tiny emotional corners.
Love can be dramatic or subtle, intense or gentle, true or false, and in these stories it manifests in all these ways. Regardless of the manifestation, in the end love is always the most important driver of humanity that exists in fiction, and in the real world.
Available in paperback and Kindle format on Amazon.com