This week’s other featured books, “Sterling and Nugget the Dragon,” by Judd B. Shaw, “Falling From Trees,” by Mike Fiorito and “A Hill City Christmas,” by Carolyn Tyree Feagans, can be seen by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: The Game Cafe.
PUBLISHED IN: 2022. The official publication date is December 20, 2022.
THE AUTHOR: Eleanor Lerman
THE EDITOR: Paul Berk.
THE PUBLISHER: Mayapple Press. Mayapple Press is a small literary press founded in 1978 by poet and editor Judith Kerman. The press celebrates literature that is both challenging and accessible: poetry that transcends the categories of “mainstream” and “avant-garde”; women’s writing; the Great Lakes/Northeastern culture; the recent immigrant experience; poetry in translation; science fiction poetry.
SUMMARY: The nine stories in The Game Cafe focus on people who live in New York City—or are traveling there—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. These men and women include a security guard; a mother with a far-away daughter; a ham radio operator; two strangers playing a board game in a café; a woman driving from Los Angeles to Manhattan who makes a stop at a famous corner in Winslow, Arizona; an unemployed airport worker who has an unexpected reconciliation with his brother; and others. While the stories are primarily set in New York, they are also meant to explore how living in modern-day urban environments unalterably shapes the fate of people going through difficult times.
THE BACK STORY: I started writing the stories in The Game Café during the dark days of the coronavirus pandemic when pundits were proclaiming that New York City was done for. They claimed that “everyone” was fleeing, that all businesses were folding, that apartment buildings were empty, and that tourists would never come back. As a lifelong New Yorker, I was outraged by the idea that New York, where I wandered the streets of Greenwich Village from the time I was a young teenager and heard the first music of the hippie generation; where I lived from the day I turned eighteen and wrote my first books; and the city that welcomed my runaway and refugee friends, could ever be anything less than the greatest city there ever was. And I knew that New York, my city, would never be defeated by a pandemic.
Certainly, New York can be a hard place to live and can challenge you every day of your life, but there is still no other city on earth that offers more access to art and learning and rewarding work. I also felt that the focus on who was “fleeing” the city was racist as well as demeaning to the working-class people of the city’s five boroughs because, in fact, the only people who could afford to decamp to their summer homes or buy a house in some other, supposedly “safe” place, were mostly white and wealthy. So, I used my outrage at the idea that New York City was on the brink of collapse to fuel my writing and that’s where all nine stories in The Game Café originated. While the stories in the collection don’t gloss over the difficulties of living in both Manhattan and its outer boroughs, they are all love letters to the city and I enjoyed every minute of writing them. And, I think my hope about the city has been rewarded: it’s doing just fine these days, thank you very much.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? The stories focus on people going through what has become a shared experience for all of us—the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve used the collection of very different characters in the book as stand-ins for the working-class people I grew up with and still know best and so I tried to create a world in which readers can walk along with these men and women—some gay, some straight—and feel a real connection with how they’re trying to grapple with the dark days that changed all our lives.
REVIEW COMMENTS: It’s early days in sending the book out for reviews so we don’t have any yet.
AUTHOR PROFILE: I grew up in the Bronx and Far Rockaway. My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and spoke very little English so I still have lots of Yiddish rolling around in my head and often talk to my dog in that language because it sounds very loving to me. I barely graduated high school and then, the day I was eighteen, I walked out the front door of my father and stepmother’s house and moved to the East Village in New York City. I managed a harpsichord kit workshop in Greenwich Village and just a few months after moving to the city I was able to rent into a tiny apartment above the workshop where I lived for 18 years and wrote my first books. Those original books were collections of poetry and the first, Armed Love, published when I was 21, was a finalist for the National Book Award, which earned me my proverbial 15 minutes of fame. In addition, because my landlord was a movie producer who became a mentor to me, I was introduced to his circle of famous and accomplished writers. They were all extraordinarily kind to me but nonetheless, they frightened me because I thought I could never be as good as they were, never write anything like their remarkable books. So, I kind of became paralyzed and I didn’t write much for many years. But one day when I was living in Queens, I got a letter from Sarabande Books asking me if I would be interested in writing a new collection of poems for them. I took my dog for a walk in a nearby park and thought about that question because I knew if I said yes it would change my life forever, change my family, and mean starting over again. But I decided to do it and since then, I have never stopped writing. I’ve produced a number of new collections of poetry over the years but have focused mainly on fiction. I think that’s because what frightened me back in my younger days was that all those well-known writers I met were novelists and I had no idea how to write novels but when I started to work again, I knew that I had to figure out how to write long-form fiction. And actually, I think I have.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: While New York City is at the heart of all the stories, they are meant to be read as a wider commentary on the resilience of America’s urban centers and the people who live there. The stories are also a celebration of the strength of working-class people to adapt to change, overcome even the most unexpected and dangerous situations, and recreate themselves and their lives when they have to. The individuals who populate the stories of The Game Café, are men and women with limited resources and some face other challenges like illness or the loss of a job or lingering grief; within this framework, they are all going to have to figure out who they will be and how they will live their lives on the other side of the pandemic. The fact that New York City is the place where they will make these decisions infuses every page because all the individuals in the stories are citizens of the city, tied to it forever, and the one thing they never question is whether or not they belong there: they know they do.
SAMPLE: Excerpt from “Woman and Dog,” which is about a woman named Jane driving home with her dog to New York City after living in Los Angeles for many years. Like all the stories in the book, “Woman and Dog” is set in the days of the pandemic.
In the morning, after she’s fed the dog and slowly marched him around behind the motel where the desert seems to start, where it stretches out towards the hazy morning horizon, she and the dog get back in the car and continue on, following the ghost of Route 66, east through Arizona. Before she turns around and goes back to L.A., before she makes that decision, there’s one place she wants to see, the reason that she planned to travel through the southern tier of the U.S. and then up through the Midwest rather than straight across the Plains states.
And so, about ninety minutes later, Jane arrives in Winslow, Arizona, a small city in Navajo County, southeast of Flagstaff and west of Albuquerque. There would be no reason to stop in Winslow except for the fact that the Eagles made it famous in the song, “Take It Easy,” which Jane fell in love with when she was sixteen years old.
On the corner of North Kinsley Avenue and East Second Street, there’s a mural of a brick wall and a pair of what look like storefront windows. Standing in front of the mural, by a Route 66 marker, is a bronze statue that people think resembles Jackson Browne, who co-wrote the song. The maybe-Jackson Browne is holding a guitar and looking thoughtful. The tableau represents the part of the song about a guy standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, when a girl in a flatbed Ford slows down to get a look at him—a moment, as Jane understood the meaning of the lyrics from the first time she heard the song on the radio—when time stops and a sudden flash of intuition cracks open a life in which nothing much is going on. Maybe the guy can climb into the truck and see what happens next. Maybe he can take that chance.
And so, this is the real starting point for Jane, the beginning of the trip home. The place where her own history starts. The records left by humankind, the clues to how the past became the present and will create the future—she will get back to those soon enough. But here, where she can turn a corner and feel like she is stepping into the slipstream of her own memory, of the time when she was the one with the life that needed to be cracked open, the lonely girl who was desperate to think there was something—anything—that would happen next, there are other archives to be reckoned with. Other stories about man and beast. Well, actually, woman and dog.
She looks at the mural where she can see the painted reflection of the truck with a girl in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel. But what Jane sees is a reflection of Jane, in her jeans and boots and Pattie Boyd hat, ready to get going, to hit the road. Ha! she thinks, feeling better already, I really am not just some old lady. I’m a person, a human being, still alive and well. Still ready to rock and roll.
She reaches out to touch the bronze statue, leaving a fingerprint that she hopes will linger a while, and then turns away. Walking back around the corner, moving step-by-step with the gentle, lazy dog, the uncountable-generations-down descendant of wolves—and surprise, surprise, he knows that, he runs through ancient streambeds in his dreams, howls at the rising moon—Jane goes back to her car, pulls out of the parking spot and drives the speed limit until she gets to the edge of town. She’s absolutely sure, now, that she can drive the little car all the way to New York City. After all, some things are small but mighty. Some things just need to be put to the test. Here I go, she thinks, as she sings to herself. As the dog barks, the sun sizzles, and Jane steps on the gas.
WHERE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Mayapplepress.com
PRICE: Trade paperback: $22.95, currently discounted for pre-order at mayapplepress.com for $18.36. The Kindle price has not yet been established.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: I am happy to talk with readers. My email is elerman1@optonline.net and my Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/eleanor.lerman
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 