I grew up reading the classics - Tolstoy, Maupassant, Chekhov, the Victorian writers, etc. and strongly value traditional literature. You can't move forward as a writer of literary fiction without honoring the past.
Janet Goodwin, the creative writing instructor, resents Charlie Raffles for several reasons: Charlie’s refusal to submit his own writing for literary critique; the black man is conspicuously smarter than her.
Ernie Levinson wants to marry Shifrah Fienberg, but the Israeli woman’s background prior to coming to work at Levinson's Whole Food Market remains an impenetrable mystery.
As though the topic makes for polite dinner conversation, eight year old Benjamin Carter announces that Mr. Jacobson, the elderly widow, who lives on Bickford street, is a weirdo.
Mrs. Chowdhary named her youngest daughter after Saint Theresa, the Little Flower of Jesus. Unfortunately, Terry has more in common with Attila the Hun than her nineteenth century namesake.
Not unlike her marriage and personal life, Sylvia Mandelstam’s literary symposium in Moscow is an unmitigated fiasco.
Following his divorce, Dr. Stanley Gilford, chief of cardiology at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, restructured his fractured life on the guiding principle of maximum gain, minimum pain.
Morris Weinstein needs an apprentice at his woodworking business. Seventeen year-old Salina Smithers just finishing high school and wouldn't know a table saw from a table wine.
Pearl Singleton, a forest ranger at the Pemberton Wildlife Preserve, is going to show eighteen year old Shawn Mariano her Osborne Smoke Finder, all six varieties of New England ferns, a beaver dam, and something he never bargained for.
Amina sees a doctor for retinal occlusion, where a perfectly clear sky is cluttered with gray smudges and filaments that aren’t really there. Now she must confront an equally troublesome vision loss.
Eudora Grossberg, who works at the local supermarket bagging groceries, is a gifted poet.
Ethan Whitfield has just met his twin soul, the penultimate love of his life, but he has also taken a vow of celibacy which complicates the matter.