Eight In Three Weeks [Paperback]

David Pablo Cohns EIGHT IN THREE WEEKS presents a masterful writers debut collection of short stories. By turns understated, harrowing, humorous, and mysterious, these stories reveal Cohns capacity for inhabiting and revealing the consciousness of an unusually wide range of characters. Women, men, and children from different cultures, subcultures, professions, and age groups are all vivid and moving as they undertake their quests, undergo their struggles, and reach their epiphanies.

In The Duchess, a working-class man named Billy copes with midlife angst by attempting to build a sailboata project that drags on as unsatisfactorily as the rest of his life. Abraham and Sarah, by contrast, not only revisits the Biblical story about the couple of that name but also segues to a modern-day Abraham and Sarah whose experiences both echo the Hebrew Bibles account and diverge from the ancient outcome. Perhaps most unusual is On Ziahtown Road, in which an old, sick Liberian man sets off on foot to find his missing daughter but takes a stranger, longer voyage than he anticipated. Other stories  Bragging Rights, Water on Travertine, Fly Away, and Eight in Three Weeks  demonstrate Cohns impressive ability to delve into childrens minds and to explore boys and girls bafflement as they attempt to figure out the adult worlds mysteries. Three other narratives  Artifacts, Last Night Ashore, and Tales from the Ice  vividly reflect Cohns first-hand knowledge of Antarctic bases while deployed as a computer scientist to the South Pole Station and elsewhere on the earths coldest continent.

Throughout EIGHT IN THREE WEEKS, David Pablo Cohn manifests nuanced command of the short story genre as well as imaginative insights into the human condition.