In midcentury America, the golden age of television, a man named Golk is wreaking havoc with the medium. Through a devastating series of exposures "You're on Camera" Golk manipulates the high and mighty, the lowdown and dirty, and the outrageous weird; all are within the compass of Richard Stern in this early novel, a comedy with as many inspired maneuvers as its rambunctious protagonist has for taking the measure of a profligate world.
""Golk" is a rich and marvelously detailed novel by a man with a cultivated intelligence; it is also the first really good book I have read about...

Cy Riemer fifty-ish, divorced, and father of four surveys the dispersal of his family with a mixture of anxiety, humor, sadness, and pride. In this wry, moving, and wise novel, Richard Stern offers his masterful portrait of Cy as the quintessential caring yet controlling parent, a relentless seeker of self-knowledge whose search is intensified through conflicts with his brilliant, ne'er-do-well son Jack. The "manipulation of a smart, sane, self-justifying narrator . . . is not the least of Stern's achievements in this delicate fabrication of tough prose and tender adjustment of sentiment."...

Written by one of America's finest contemporary novelists, Other Men's Daughters is the story of an intense love affair between a middle-aged professor and a young woman, wise and worldly beyond her years.

One reviewer writes, "I...was struck not simply by its psychological depth but particularly by the combination of toughness and tenderness through which romantic love was represented and discussed. The lack of sentimentality (in a novel about the refusal to live a life without love) was immensely important to me...and is likely ...to be immensely important ...today."

Written by one of America's finest contemporary novelists, Natural Shocks is a witty, wonderfully intelligent novel about a successful journalist who suddenly finds himself jolted by the "natural shocks" of his private life. A new foreword by James Schiffer relates the novel to our time and describes the mastery which in 1985 won Stern the Medal of Merit for the Novel given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

One reader writes, "I read Natural Shocks as a student, and this novel has stayed with me over the years. I recall the poignant pain-pleasure I experienced in...

Set against the splendor of Venice, "Stitch" is the moving story of the meeting between a group of Americans and a world-famous sculptor. Stitch, a character whom certain critics have recognized as one of the most remarkable portraits of Ezra Pound, is a man who has shaped and been shaped by the most profound intellectual and political experiences of the 20th century. What the Americans learn from him comprises the brilliant center of this novel.