Book excerpt: These previously published stories and short fictions, whether realistic or surreal, are always imaginative and sometimes startling. On the opening page, we meet a man who takes a walk at Coney Island, writes an open letter of confession in the sand, believing it will vanish with the tide, but shockingly discovers that his secrets have been revealed to the world. We find a man who buys a living room carpet that becomes a terrifying jungle and a man who just missed becoming a movie star. There is also the manager of a shop in Harlem whose salesmen peddle portraits of Christ whose eyes seem to follow the viewer and who unconsciously overcomes his racial bias, back in the Sixties. In Bad Trip, a man kidnaps and murders a younger version of himself in the desert and lives to tell the tale. Nothing Forever, C. Kenneth Pellow notes in Writers Forum where the story first appeared, is constructed almost precisely backwards, although a more useful key to opening the storys meanings may be the metaphor, the trope, embodied in AND/OR. There is a fairy tale about a golden squirrel kidnapped in Czarist Russia and a fable featuring a white stallion whose fierce fight for freedom gives hope to the homeless huddled around a campfire deep in the Great Depression. (This story was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.) Schorbs stories are various in form and style but uniformly entertaining. Enjoy!