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Rebecca and steven schwartz los angeles3/19/2024 ![]() It's a brilliant look at all the profound and prosaic thoughts that play across the minds of the people in that room.ħ. Told from the multiple perspectives of the teacher and the students, who sit in shocked terror and confusion over what he's going to do. A history teacher who is a Civil War re-enactor pulls out a Civil War-era pistol and points it at his head in front of his class. Indie - 17 pp - A tour de force that examines a tragedy but still manages to find a few lighthearted, comic moments along the way. It's a heart-wrenching story that also offers some eye-opening details of the ego-smashing hardships writers who aren't on the bestseller lists contend with.Ħ. Even though he got married and had children of his own, who are now happy and successful, he can't let go of the desire to reconnect with his first child, who lived a perfectly content life without him. Now, 30 years later, after a few unsuccessful books, his writing has dried up. He was young then and didn't want to be encumbered with a child, so he could pursue his ambitions of becoming a writer. It's about a man who tries to reconnect with the daughter he and his girlfriend at the time gave up for adoption. Galisteo Street - 22 pp - A story that blew me away when I first read it in Prairie Schooner, and it had the same effect when I read it for the second time in this collection. Told with remarkable poignancy and dignity.ĥ. Interacting with the man who was once the girl he lusted after sets off a whirl of confusing emotions. When they reunite, his cousin has had a sex change. That occasion was the first time he'd met her, and he'd developed an instant crush. Seeing Miles - 14 pp - A great, great story about a man who reunites with his cousin, whom he hasn't seen in 25 years since his Bar Mitzvah 25 years earlier. ![]() He befriends the sergeant who is trying to recruit him, but a failed encounter with the sergeant's disturbed daughter has major consequences.Ĥ. ![]() Absolute Zero - 21p - A moving story about a 17-year-old who wants to join the Marines but needs the permission of his mother, who is vehemently opposed to wars. A man steals her wallet when she is napping, and then she meets a kind man in a bar and has to decide whether to take advantage of the in-between state her life has fallen into.ģ. Stranger - 17 pp - A wife and mother is waiting in the Philadelphia airport for a flight home to Denver, after her father died. Trouble ensues after the young man kills a deer out of season, presumably to feed his family.Ģ. He's leading a quiet life, still pining for his ex-wife, when he lets a hippie-ish young couple expecting a baby stay in a cabin on his land. Bless Everybody - 21 pp - A powerful and dramatic story about a retiree living on a large piece of property on the Colorado/Wyoming border. Schwartz is an author who makes you respect and have total compassion for his characters, even as he's revealing all of their warts.ġ. To play the simple game of finding one word that characterizes Schwartz's writing, it's dignity - all the characters in these pieces have it, even when they are behaving badly. Just two examples - a man reunites with the cousin he had a crush on as a teenager after she's had a sex-change operation ("Seeing Miles") a teacher pulls out a gun in front of his class and points it at his head ("Indie"). His premises are also always bold and fascinating. While I get totally immersed in his stories, there are times when you just have to stop amd marvel at how good he is at everything - description, dialogue, metaphors, character development and plotting. But it's rare to find a writer who excels at every aspect of writing. Many better known writers are famous for their talent with a particular facet of writing, such as dialogue or description. But over the past decade-plus, his writing has only been in appearing in literary magazines, and while I have been able to catch a few along the way, I was excited to learn he had another collection. That was published after 2 fantastic story collections, and then another novel came out a few years later. ![]() I have been following Steven Schwartz since his great 1994 novel, Therapy, which still ranks among my top 5, all-time favorite novels.
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