Bøger af Michael Cocchiarale

Still Time is a collection of twenty-five short and shorter stories exploring tensions that arise in a variety of contemporary relationships: a young boy must deal with the wrath of his out-of-work father; a woman runs into a man twenty years after an awkward sexual encounter; a wife, unable to conceive, imagines her own murder, as well as the reaction of her emotionally distant husband; a soon-to-be tenured English professor tries to come to terms with her husband's shocking return to the religion of his youth; an assembly line worker, married for thirty years, discovers the surprising secret life of his recently hospitalized wife. Whether a few hundred or a few thousand words, these and other stories in the collection depict characters at moments of deep crisis. Some feel powerless, overwhelmed-unable to do much to change the course of their lives. Others rise to the occasion and, for better or for worse, say or do the thing that might transform them for good. Even in stories with the most troubling of endings, there remains the possibility of redemption. For each of the characters, there is still time.

None of the Above spans twenty seven years (1980-2007) of the life of Increase Alt, a fearful, introverted sort who does a poor job of paying attention to things that don't directly affect his life. Throughout grade school, high school, and college, his energies become more and more directed toward his own pursuits-the study of literature, the attempt to secure a girlfriend, the forging and maintaining of relationships with his male peers. Events happening in the world, in the country, and in his hometown of Cleveland-a Reagan-Carter presidential debate, the Iran Contra scandal, the AIDS epidemic, the first Gulf War-become important only when they threaten to pull him out of his comfort zone. As a highly-educated adult, he returns to the town of his birth to discover he still has much to learn, as both personal trials and traumas in the country (and world) put his maturity to the test.

Over the course of the last century, American fiction writers and poets have used sports figures and sporting events in order to make significant points on themes of identity as they are connected to gender, race, class, and nationality.