Where Things Are When You Lose Them
Author: Martin Golan | ISBN: 0978997425 : 9780978997427 | Format: Paperback | Size: 155x230mm | Pages: 175 | Weight: .296 Kg. | Published: Birch Brook Press – April 2008 | Availability: In Print | Subjects: Short stories
Stories include these intriguing titles: “The Shape of Water,” “The Loneliness of Men,” “Intimacy,” “The Cicadas are Throbbing,” “Nora, Standing Naked,” “The Perfect Woman.”
Published in a handsome trade paperback, featuring cover photography by Peter Jacobs.
This tightly written collection of twelve short stories
by a veteran journalist confronts contemporary issues in relationships, and the nature of loss, with the keen eye of a reporter, a poet’s ear for language, and the insights of one who has “been there.” As Golan leads us through a landscape of loss, he doesn’t merely illuminate these moments but seems to celebrate them: “Loss,” he says, “comes with being human, with any life lived fully and well.” “Golan writes of contemporary marriage with humor and reckless candor. He voices our marital anxieties, its frustrations, losses and joys. Somewhere between the lies we tell each other and those we tell ourselves, Golan finds a vast human neediness for romantic love.” — Ken Kalfus, author, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.
“A novel is like a marriage,” says Golan in THE MONTCLAIR TIMES. “A short story is like a brief but intense affair. And a poem is like a one-night stand.” “Precisely written stories which shimmer with humanity…”– CERVENA BARVA NEWSLETTER.
Martin Golan
has been a reporter, editor, and feature writer at newspapers and magazines. He is now an editor for Reuters in New York City. His first novel, My Wife’s Last Lover, was published to much acclaim in 2000, and spent over a year as No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list for the area of New Jersey where he lives. He’s published poetry, fiction, and essays in many magazines, among them Cervena Barva Press, Istanbul Literary Review, Poet Lore, Fiction Warehouse, and Bitterroot, where he served as associate editor for several years, working closely with legendary poet and mystic Menke Katz.
Several of the stories in Where Things Are When You Lose Them are among those that appeared in these publications. Golan has a master’s degree in creative writing from the City College of New York (when the faculty included Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut) and studied fiction writing with the novelist Leslie Epstein. He lives with his wife, a psychologist, and their two children in the New Jersey town where his novel and many of the stories take place. He also volunteers with a group of local media people to raise funds for the public library and promote reading and writing skills for children.
Although he’s studied with well-known writers, worked as a journalist for a large international news organization, and held odd jobs — from gas station attendant to ice-cream truck driver — Golan says he learned the most about writing fiction from driving a taxicab in New York City, which he did in college and between newspaper jobs. (“Intimacy,” in Where Things Are When You Lose Them, appears to have been inspired by this one-time job.)
You hear real dialogue acted out as if on a stage (albeit behind you, not in front); you see people interact, on dates and social and business occasions; you witness chance encounters between strangers ‘sharing’ a cab; you have lonely men and women pour their hearts out to you, about lovers and drugs and the death of their dreams; and you enjoy a never-ending stream of out-of-towners experiencing a fascinating city that you see with new eyes — it, like the passengers themselves, ultimately unknowable. — Martin Golan
More on Martin Golan can be found here…
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