The Very Short Stories of a Much Longer Life — Paul Levine

The twenty-five quickly read stories of this collection (fourteen of which were first published in literary journals and magazines) range from the surreal setting of a man trying to cope with apples falling in his house to the coming-of-age stories of a fifteen year old boy.

Here is a mother who lives out her fantasy by pressuring her daughter to be a model; a man waiting to be fired for dropping a rolled up paper on his boss' face during a meeting; a fifty-six year old man who tries to justify being with a twenty-four year old woman; a teenage girl who struggles with her mother's fixation on animals; a man who is not able to move from the checker square he is stuck on; a man who is trying to figure out whether to continue his relationship with the woman he brought on a camping trip; a student caught between the two worlds of a graduate English class and thoughts about his infant son; a lonely man on Christmas Eve opening the gifts he bought for himself; and a young woman who suffers through her over-analyzing each gesture and remark made by her date.