The Bright Streets of Surfside chronicles 10 years in the life of Isaac Bashevis Singer, as witnessed and shared by a fellow writer close to him at the time. In 1978, with a mixture of hero worship and academic responsibility as director of creative writing at the University of Miami, Lester Goran brought Singer to teach at the Coral Gables campus. The eminent Polish-American author was then 74 years old and five months away from receiving the Nobel Prize. Goran became Singer's closest friend and translator as they taught advanced courses in creative writing together until Singer...

Tales from the Irish Club contains 11 wry accounts of an enclave of Irish Americans in Pittsburgh during and after World War II. In this first collection of short stories by Lester Goran are the often comic, sometimes tragic tales of Jack Lanahan, the transcendental artist who carves nothing but wooden roosters; Long Conall O'Brien, haunted by the ghosts of prostitutes he has known world-wide; Mrs. Pauline Conlon, famous as the woman who outlives three husbands--until she meets Sailor Kiernan; and the night an image of the Madonna appears on the wall of Local No. 9 of the Ancient...

Lester Goran's first book of short stories, Tales from the Irish Club, was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as a "Notable Book of the Year 1996." This second collection also centers around a group of men and women in an Irish-American enclave in Pittsburgh, primarily during the years surrounding World War II, but extending at times into the eighties.

With evocative settings and narratives ranging from the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy hilarity to richly detailed realism, Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places...