Eccentric Circles by Larry Duberstein (1992-08-06)

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Five Bullets

(Every Jew who lived through the Holocaust had a story wor...)

Every Jew who lived through the Holocaust had a story worth telling, but not every Jew has been inclined to tell that story. Such was the case with Karel Bondy, a rising young structural engineer in Prague when the Nazis invaded his nation and began preparing the fortress town of Terezin to receive his people. Married and the father of three when he was taken there (and from there to Auschwitz), he was alone when luck allowed him to fight back, first with the partisans and later the Russian army. And he was alone when after the war he came to America to begin a new life as Carl Barry. What these experiences did to a strong yet sensitive man caught in the grip of the 20th century s greatest tragedy is at the heart of this extraordinary novel. And because Bondy/Barry was not eager to share those experiences, we must rely on his inquisitive American nephew Lewis to ferret out the details for us--and upon author Larry Duberstein to weave their tales together, in all the horror and sadness and, more unexpectedly, the beauty and humor. Karel Bondy is an unforgettable character whose story will by turns shock, intrigue, and amuse you.

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The Handsome Sailor: A Novel

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The Day the Bozarts Died

(Stanley Noseworthy is, at best, a serial monogamist. At w...)

Stanley Noseworthy is, at best, a serial monogamist. At worst, a faithless rake. Now his record- breaking long-term lover ("1001 better-than-Arabian nights") Nina, is fed up with his "inimitable bull%#$#" and threatening to end their relationship. "Show us there is some good in you," Stanley's best friend urges. "Show us there is a brain." But Stanley's decisions do not tend to be made by his brain. He has profoundly mixed feelings about losing Nina, for he is nothing if not a profoundly mixed (up) fellow. Stanley is either a dedicated artist or a posturing fraud, a charming rogue or a shallow lothario, tragic victim or pathetic loser-- or all of the above. (Vote Online!" Stanley might well say to this, for he is always prepared to satirize his own life as sharply as the life around him.) Meanwhile, Stanley's beloved artist's cooperative, The "Hotel Beaux-Arts" (hence Bozarts) to its inhabitants, is also under threat. Since its endowment a quarter-century ago by the august Canterbury Institute of Technology, the "Bozarts" has had a frequently glorious, always rambunctious, character-rich history. Lately, mysteriously, it has been dwindling toward extinction. Stanley (who may or may not be paranoid) fears the reason for this is either that the Institute wants its building back for more profitable use, or that George W. Bush has declared an end to Art and Thought in America -- or both of the above. In The Day The Bozarts Died, we follow the many rich strands of Stanley's Tale through hilarity, absurdity, and wrenching sadness to an unexpectedly moving conclusion.

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The Alibi Breakfast

(Eight years ago, readers were invited to accompany Mauric...)

Eight years ago, readers were invited to accompany Maurice Locksley on his rounds, as he paid court to his wife, his ex-wife, and his mistress in dizzying succession. THE MARRIAGE HEARSE, his account of that wild winter's night, was judged "one of the funniest, smartest, and most generous novels about marriage from a male point of view." (Phyllis Rose, in The Nation) Locksley himself was "by turns so cocky, so self-deprecating, and so funny that it is impossible not to like him." (Publishers Weekly) Most surprisingly, perhaps, the book, according to The New York Times Book Review, was "above all a love story, and a rather touching one at that." Now, eight years older in THE ALIBI BREAKFAST, Locksley is still "Laugh-out-loud funny" (Bloomsbury Review) but not nearly so cocky as he contemplates the possibility that his riches are reduced to a single woman-or is it even worse than that? Certainly it is worse when he considers his work as an author, which has become unpopular and non-existent, in that order. Even his health is precarious. And his three children, so realistically drawn in the earlier volume, have grown into vivid emotional lives of their own. Locksley must now watch those lives unfold from his sickbed in the opening chapters of this bittersweet summer fable. Duberstein's prose is as rich, precise, and allusive as ever; the people in his "house" are as real as the people in your house (terrifying thought), and he weaves the varied strands of plot into a tale of rare depth and integrity.

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The Marriage Hearse

(At 5 P.M. on a snowy night, Maurice Locksley, sometime li...)

At 5 P.M. on a snowy night, Maurice Locksley, sometime literary stud, stops off at a Boston pub and there, with a glass of beer, launches a 10 1/2 hour journey into the riskier regions of the heart. First he's off to dinner with his wife and 4-year-old son... then on to an evening in the suburbs, where his ex-wife and teenage children wait... and then back to town for a postmidnight tryst with Maggie, his exuberant young mistress. Maurice, at forty, is poised on the brink of adventures yet untaken, but where he wanders may put him at risk, caught between the rock and hard places of love.

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The Handsome Sailor by Larry Duberstein (1998-08-06)

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The Twoweeks

(Cal and Lara are happily married, though (problematically...)

Cal and Lara are happily married, though (problematically) not to one another. And though they came of age in the sexual wilderness of the 1960s, neither is seeking to expand any sexual horizons now, 10 years later. Nevertheless, they find themselves in what each presumes to be an altogether trite situation--committed to monogamy and fidelity, yet so powerfully drawn together that their fall seems inevitable. The way out proposed by Lara, a "Twoweeks" carved out of their normal, predictable lives, is intended of course to take two weeks and be done with. What happens to these attractive, lively, storm-tossed souls before, during, and after the Twoweeks is the subject of Larry Duberstein's engaging new novel. Duberstein's first novel, The Marriage Hearse, while rife with surface irony and wit, was described by The New York Times Book Review as "above all a love story and a rather touching one at that." The same can be said of Duberstein's 8th novel, The Twoweeks, though it travels an arc of over 30 years, where The Marriage Hearse takes place in the course of a single white night. The Twoweeks too is "above all a love story" and, like most good ones, it is as much about the dilemmas of love as the romance.

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