About the author:
Richard Cohen was born and raised in the Bronx, NY. He graduated with a degree in anthropology from the University of Michigan, where he won the Hopwood Award for short fiction. He sold his first novel, Domestic Tranquility, the day he was scheduled to begin law school, so he immediately dropped out. Since then he has published two more novels (Say You Want Me and Don't Mention the Moon) as well as a book on the writing craft (Writer's Mind: Crafting Fiction). He now makes his living as a freelance educational writer. The father of two grown children, he lives in Austin, Texas with his new family.
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The father of a runaway clings to his daughter's memory by stapling her picture to telephone poles. ("Putting Up Signs.") A girl at a Catskill resort in 1964 finds that her sexual initiation is like an awakening into the Twilight Zone. ("Theme from a Summer Place.") A wellness practitioner whose mind is disintegrating grasps for a last chance at love and sanity. ("Dream Group Forming.") A young woman listens appalled as her mother confesses a lifetime of friendlessness. ("Cousin Gemma.") A concentration camp survivor, distracted by grief, loses his child in a Bronx movie theater .("Refuge.") A boy's divorced parents--and his father's girlfriend--are also his schoolteachers. ("What Makes You You" and "Possible Future Stepmother.")
The stories of Richard Cohen illuminate family life with a realism large enough to accommodate illusion. Driven by cognitive distortions, fugitive affections, and imaginary escapes, his characters turn the world around them into an arena of needless but somehow fated suffering. In a Chinese restaurant or on the drive to a state park, their inner lives are waiting to trip them up. Most of these stories are about children and their parents. Some of the children are grownups taking care of their elders; others are chronologically juvenile. At the turning point of youth to age, of singleness to marriage, they fight their way out of the webs of family and self with a degree of success equal finally to their gift for belief.
Unsurpassed as a portraitist of childhood, Richard Cohen knows that terms like "child" and "parent" are fluid constructs not always bound by age. An expert witness of the domestic lives of men--a subject strangely under represented in contemporary American publishing--he now also shows an uncanny understanding of women.
Twelve strong stories, chronicling our passages and passions with wit and insight, transfiguring them with exhilarating art.