The Reasons I Won't be Coming

Second Hand

Excellent condition

The nine smart, thoughtful stories in this collection explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers. They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and the hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire.

A man wakes to find himself in conversation with an ex-lover while a new and younger woman lies naked and asleep beside him in "Good Morning Again." A marriage on the brink of extinction is seen through the eyes of a child obsessed with prehistoric reptiles in "In the Time of the Dinosaur," and in the title story, a public servant in the death throes of the twentieth century fails to realize his every certainty is about to be washed away by a tidal wave of change.

The law figures in two stories - "Manslaughter," an account of murder in suburbia, and "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine," which chronicles a lawyer's illicit romantic obsession, drawing parallels between pleadings at law and pleadings in love. In "I Was Only In a Childish Way Connected to the Established Order," a failed poet - sustained only by the voice of the celebrated Russian poet Osip Mandelstam - achieves improbable heroism during an episode of madness and violence, and a young contemporary Job struggles with his family's past and his precarious future in "Spitalnic's Last Year."

The final novella-length story, "A Tale in Two Cities," tells the heart-wrenching story of a Russian Jewish family amid the anti-Semitism of Brezhnev's Moscow and their ongoing vulnerability in the West.