Dancing With Dasein And Other Stories [Paperback]

In this collection of fourteen storiesmostly set among working folks in the Hudson River Valley of New Yorkmusic, food, philosophy, and magic weave through tales that are by turns gritty, aching, and comical. Characters grapple with unfulfilled dreams in a dizzying, often alien culture. Meet a Bronx Italian Zen master with a baby and an ex-football-star partner&a young curator assigned to coddle an infamous avant-garde artist whose assistant threatens her marriage&a Homer scholar who disappears in a blizzard over a stone wall, never to be seen again&a failed graduate student who nearly gets paralyzed delivering a case of gourmet cat food to his Heidegger professor to settle a vague psychic debt&a reincarnating Ancient Egyptian chef who travels thousand of years from the banks of the Nile to a surf-crazed town in Southern California to open a bakery&and others. All are drawn with empathy and wry humor, observed through a sharp lens as they wrestle and waltz with the blunt challenge of being humanDancing with Dasein.