Eccentric Circles: Stories

At a young man’s funeral, the undertaker offers his thoughts on lifestyle, along with a hot tip on the big stakes race that afternoon. In another bizarre burial twist, two feuding misfit brothers speed across America in a battered Chevy, trying to fulfill their mother’s dying wish.

Meanwhile, the second craziest person in Casper, Wyoming, contemplates infidelity with the first, a young beauty who climbs through his window; a chance meeting with a nine-year-old boy on a bicycle finishes off a marriage; and a nude dancer in New Orleans, mistaken for a prostitute, is asked to take a check. (“The check is good, Catherine. Absolutely.”)

These are just a few of the compelling people and situations you will encounter in this wide-ranging selection of short fiction from Larry Duberstein. Some of Duberstein’s characters do move in eccentric social circles and the patterns of his literary art make larger and even more eccentric circles. No one is exempted, however, from the clear truth of consequence: “The lizard’s egg will hatch, and out will come the lizard.”

Humming with irony, humor, and an infectious enthusiasm for life at every level, these tales feature the same crystalline diction, the unique mix of sympathy, wit, and insight, that distinguish Larry Duberstein’s highly acclaimed novels.