As he labored on his masterpiece MOBY DICK in 1851, Herman Melville was a popular and charismatic young author. One year later, this Melville-—successful, outgoing, knowable-—had gone underground. His letters, previously witty and expansive, would, for the rest of his life, be brief and businesslike. He burned manuscripts and letters received, left behind no personal journals, and by 1856 had ceased to write fiction altogether. It is not surprising, therefore, that the mystery of Melville, arguably America's greatest novelist, has enticed generations of readers and scholars. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is Melville's return to fiction very late in life. After nearly a thirty-five year hiatus and with no intention of publishing, he wrote the tale of the handsome sailor, BILLY BUDD, just before he died. Through a combination of research, intuition, and sheer literary muscle, Larry Duberstein weaves speculations that bring Herman Melville to life, in all his...

Stanley Noseworthy is, at best, a serial monogamist. At worst, a faithless rake. Now his record-breaking long-term lover ("1001 better-than-Arabian nights") Nina is fed up with his "inimitable bull%#$#" and threatening to end their relationship. "Show us there is some good in you," Stanley's best friend urges. "Show us there is a brain." But Stanley's decisions do not tend to be made by his brain. He has profoundly mixed feelings about losing Nina, for he is nothing if not a profoundly mixed (up) fellow. Stanley is either a dedicated artist or a posturing fraud, a charming rogue or a shallow lothario, tragic victim or pathetic loser—or all of the above. ("Vote Online!" Stanley might well say to this, for he is always prepared to satirize his own life as sharply as the life around him.) Meanwhile, Stanley's beloved artists' cooperative, The "Hotel Beaux-Arts" (hence Bozarts) to its inhabitants, is also under threat. Since its endowment a quarter-century ago by...

At 5 P.M. on a snowy night, Maurice Locksley, sometime literary stud, stops off at a Boston pub and there, with a glass of beer, launches a 10 1/2 hour journey into the riskier regions of the heart. First he's off to dinner with his wife and 4-year-old son . . . then on to an evening in the suburbs, where his ex-wife and teenage children wait . . . and then back to town for a post midnight tryst with Maggie, his exuberant young mistress. Maurice, at forty, is poised on the brink of adventures yet untaken, but where he wanders may put him at risk, caught between the rock and hard places of love.

A novel of love and lust, memory and desire. Cal and Lara are happily married, though (problematically) not to one another. And though they came of age in the sexual wilderness of the 1960's, neither is seeking to expand any sexual horizons now, 10 years later.Nevertheless, they find themselves in what each presumes to be an altogether trite situation—committed to monogamy and fidelity, yet so powerfully drawn together that their "Fall" seems inevitable.The way out proposed by Lara, a "Twoweeks" carved out of their normal, predictable lives, is intended of course to take two weeks and be done with. What happens to these attractive, lively, storm-tossed souls before, during, and after The Twoweeks is the subject of Larry Duberstein's engaging new novel.Duberstein's first novel, The Marriage Hearse, while rife with surface irony and wit, was described by The New York Times Book Review as "above all a love story and a rather touching one at that." The same can be...

A midsummer morning, Brooklyn, 1955. Oscar Carnovsky, a respectable (yet hardly distinguished) middle-aged man, leaves for work in the usual fashion: takes his share of the morning paper, kisses his wife goodbye, and waves back as he turns the corner of Linden Boulevard. He has done it precisely this way five thousand times. This particular morning, however, he waves from the corner and is not seen again, nor is he heard from, for years. Decades later (at Oscar's funeral) his daybooks come to light—a record of the missing years and of his life as The Invisible Mensch. This unremarkable man will soon become an unforgettable character as you accompany him on his flight through the 1950s in a highly original second novel from Larry Duberstein, whose earlier work, The Marriage Hearse, was hailed by the critics.

Just turned forty and living alone, Tim Bannon is sliding comfortably into midlife crisis when his orphaned niece and nephew arrive on his doorstep. Though Tim loves these two children, he has his doubts about being in loco parentis. For starters, he is gay and the year is 1990—long before the age of gay buddies on primetime TV. 1990 is a time of terror, a time when even perfectly nice people fear they will die from touching a gay friend. If they have one. Nor is it clear that Tim's surviving sister, Erica, and her husband, Earl, are perfectly nice people. Sexy, flaky, undirected Erica and redneck, unapologetically reactionary Earl (who, Tim is sure, shoots his dogs to simplify summer travel plans) have their own doubts about Tim's fitness, and they enjoin a New Hampshire court to take the kids from him. As Tim marshals friends, colleagues, lawyers, and shrinks (Bannon's Queer Army of the Republic) to do battle against Earl and his folksy lawyer Merle, The Mt....

At a young man's funeral, the undertaker offers his thoughts on lifestyle, along with a hot tip on the big stakes race that afternoon. In another bizarre burial twist, two feuding misfit brothers speed across America in a battered Chevy, trying to fulfill their mother's dying wish. Meanwhile, the second craziest person in Casper, Wyoming, contemplates infidelity with the first, a young beauty who climbs through his window; a chance meeting with a nine-year-old boy on a bicycle finishes off a marriage; and a nude dancer in New Orleans, mistaken for a prostitute, is asked to take a check. ("The check is good, Catherine. Absolutely.") These are just a few of the compelling people and situations you will encounter in this wide-ranging selection of short fiction from Larry Duberstein. Some of Duberstein's characters do move in eccentric social circles and the patterns of his literary art make larger and even more eccentric circles. No one is exempted, however, from the...

Postcards from Pinsk is the story of a middle-aged Beacon Hill shrink coming to grips with himself. The "postcard" is the catalyst for crisis—his wife of long standing is divorcing him. It appears she has good reason, yet as Orrin Summers wrestles with solitude, self-deception, and a general inability to behave himself, the reader becomes increasingly comfortable inside Orrin's witty, quirky persona and increasingly won over by the slightly goofy heroism of this distinctly antiheroic figure. Long insulated from the real hurly burly of life, Orrin must take the late 1980s as he finds them making small talk with his ex-wife's answering machine, coping with his daughter's lovers, Hickey and Genghis Ferguson, fending off the private eye, Bemis, and finding surprising images of himself in The Man Crushed by Quarters, in The Boston Red Socks (and his own shoes), and in Pigford, a man of the streets with whom Orrin is forced to acknowledge "an irrefutable...