I didn't set out to write about sex, though in some of these stories it does appear that that's what makes the turkey trot. Rather, the beginning was mundane enough. In August, 2008, I discovered two boxes of old letters in the basement of our house in Vermont, letters I received and saved between the ages of 18 and 29. For reasons I can t explain, these crinkly typed and written pages ignited in me a creative frenzy. I resurrected and rewrote four old short stories and over the next eight months created seven new ones. Have I a favorite? I like them all, but it struck me in my final...

Can a Lutheran stockbroker from the Midwest and an ambitious Jewish financial headhunter from Great Neck find happiness? Well, maybe, if they climb New York State's biggest mountain together, We're talking Fire Island and the Hamptons and group summer houses and art parties on 57th Street. It's summer, 1972, two new World Trade Center towers reach for the sky and the Dow Jones Industrials bid to top 1000 for the first time. But people are people and problems are problems and Scott Lehmann and Jennifer Cohen encounter their share. Scott pictures himself, in the end, like Gary Cooper in High...

Sometimes at night when the wind moves in the trees and the moon skips from cloud to cloud I get to thinking. Where now is Jennifer, or Eileen, or Christina? Why did I do that? Why didn't I do this instead? How could I have been so stupid? I remember faces, names, moods of moment. And maybe another story is born. Most of us remember defining moments in our own lives. That's what I tried to do in these ten stories. Go back. Examine. Wonder. There's regret here, and humor, ugliness, sex. There's the sheer joy of writing. I feel it. I want you to feel it too. "To write -- for me those two words...

Recently divorced, hoping to jumpstart his journalistic career at the prestigious Washington Herald, Kyle Hansen returns to Montana to write a series of articles on the upcoming Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and on his first day back he meets Ginny Foster, the tall, striking wife of a football coach he hated. Pursue, Kyle thinks, for lust, for revenge, but he has only two weeks. Then five white men assault two Indian kids in a bar and in retaliation Montana's Blackfoot Tribe blockades roads in and out of Glacier Park. Kyle's editor, Jack Leventhal, assigns him to stay and cover the story....

Wade Talbot relishes the chaos of journalism. He starts as an editor of a weekly newspaper in North Carolina and becomes a reporter in New York just as the civil rights struggles explode in the 1960s. Becky Anderson leaps from her little southern town to college, to New York and then to Europe, where through sheer grit she becomes a force in the movie business. Wade romanticizes his boyhood in the hills of home. Becky, perennially short of money, can't wait to break away. But something clicks between them. They compete, they quarrel, they savage each other, and one day in the deep rolling...

I did not set out to write about sex, though in some of these stories it does appear that's what makes the turkey trot. Rather, the beginning was mundane enough. Not long ago I discovered two boxes of old letters in the basement of our house in Vermont, letters I received and saved between the ages of 18 and 31. For reasons I can not explain, these crinkly typed and written pages ignited a creative frenzy. I rewrote four old short stories and over the next several months created seven new ones. Do I have a favorite? I like them all, but it struck me in my final run-through for this volume...

Can a Lutheran stockbroker from the Midwest and a Jewish financial headhunter from Great Neck find happiness? Well, maybe, if they climb New York State's biggest mountain together. We're talking Fire Island and the Hamptons and group summer houses and art parties on 57th Street. It's summer, 1972, two new World Trade Center towers reach for the sky and the Dow Jones Industrials bid to top 1000 for the first time. But people are people and problems are problems and Scott Lehmann and Jennifer Cohen encounter their share. Scott pictures himself, in the end, like Gary Cooper in High Noon,...