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Dancing with Dasein and Other Stories

Product ID : 45535698


Galleon Product ID 45535698
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About Dancing With Dasein And Other Stories

Product Description In this collection of fourteen stories—mostly set among working folks in the Hudson River Valley of New York—music, 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 human—Dancing with Dasein. Review "'Dancing with Dasein' is more than a book of engagingly quirky short stories; it is a visit with a wise old friend who maintains a compassionate worldview of this absurd little planet in the cosmos and its walking wounded inhabitants. Every page is suffused with an abiding affection." --Jay Blotcher, journalist and memoirist "Morganstern’s well known love of music has influenced his ear for language; throughout the collection, the flow is seamless.... His rich imagination keeps the tales dancing on the edge of magical realism, while his eye for the telling details of gritty, complicated lives anchors them firmly to their workaday settings. And as if that weren’t enough, the man is hilariously funny." --Anne Pyburn Craig, BlueStone Press Review "'Of all the tofu joints in the world, he'd walked into mine.' Morganstern's funny, sad, exceedingly human stories set in the Hudson Valley and their portrayals of our foibles, vanities and dreams, nascent and crushed, bring to mind such classic regionals as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Salinger's Upper West Side, and Trollope's Barsetshire. Dancing with Dasein will make you want to live in a place like Rosendale, New York, or stay as far away as humanly possible." --Jennifer Belle, best-selling author of 'High Maintenance' and other books "Readers will have such a good time with these stories. It’s not even the storyline in some cases, but the words Morganstern uses to tell them. He has a unique and powerful voice. Morganstern is in his prime with hilarious and spot-on character development that you’ll recognize as authentic and off the rails." --Kevin Hurley, author of 'Cut and Cover' "Mark Morganstern has an original voice and every story displays his great talent. The stories are original and quirky--and very enjoyable." --Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of 'Sleeping Arrangements' About the Author Mark Morganstern is a native of Schenectady, New York. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music, played bass fiddle, and toured with jazz and classical ensembles before deciding that music was not his best choice of profession. An avid reader and writer, he switched majors, studied with Edna O’Brien, Maureen Howard, and Jonathan Wordsworth, and graduated from the City University of New York with an MA in English/Creative Writing. His fiction has appeared in Prima Materia, The Crescent City Review, Piedmont Literary Review, New Southern Literary Messenger, Hunger Magazine, Expresso Tilt, Mothering Magazine, and other journals, and was anthologized in Tribute to Orpheus II. He received an honorable mention for his story, “Tomorrow’s Special,” published in the Chronogram 11/06 Fiction Contest issue, selected by guest judge, Valerie Martin. Mark subs at the local high school (everything from physics to gym, occasionally even English) and books concerts for The Rosendale Cafe, a vegetarian eatery he owns with his wife Susan