Light and Dark and Other Stories

The stories in this book are unified in one sense: the main characters, young to old, experience remarkable moments of light and dark in their lives. An eighty-year-old writer finds his ordered life upended when his long-absent rocker daughter appears with her mentally impaired teenager; an adolescent boy finds out more than he cares to know about darkness from carnival workers; a man in love with a BBC Star Baker from afar attempts to live out his TV fantasies with unhappy results; a brainy autistic child learns compassion from a chickadee; a knife-thrower, a stripper, and a barrel racer alter each other's lives at a 4H fair; a Kansas farm woman finds a way back to the technicolor adventures of her youth, guided by a religious con man. These and other stories, thirteen in all, are newly written, published here for the first time.