The Capital of Kansas City — Gary Gildner

Fiction. In Gary Gildner's fourth collection of stories, composition teacher Wanda Delight, in heels long and sharp enough to pierce a rattler, loses her heart to prime example Timmy Sheean; WWII vet Sergeant Major George Prolly flees Piney Woods Rest in his wheelchair, leaving behind Miss Flambeau the exotic dancer; Kansas City lawyer Mary Beth Urquhart makes her way among her long-ago college poetry professor, truck driver Marvin Gaye, and the cologned-up, slippery father of a White Sox pitching phenom. Elsewhere, the bishop's teenaged nephew and yard boy, "Samson" Tuohy, is smitten by Professor Singh's young cello-playing wife Isabel plus there's Polish beauty Beata, old bronc rider Ray Wheeler, Aunt Gussie, the king and queen of the swans, and many more."