eBook Store
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
I’ve made several of my previously published essays and short stories available for purchase and download from Smashwords.com. Previews of each of my mini-eBooks are available so you can decide if the story works for you before spending your money.
Smashwords publishes eBooks in a variety of formats that will support just about any reading software and device, from the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook to good old PDF for your PC or Mac. If my words don’t strike your fancy, browse around the Smashwords site and you might find something you like from another author. If you find something you like, buy it. The digital format will help save a few trees, a lucky author can buy himself or herself a cup of coffee, and the low prices will save you some money.
It’s a simple exchange of values. You give them money, they give you an eBook.
After the Fire
My memoir about a writing workshop and the teacher whose lessons on the art of fiction and the art of living continue to teach and inspire me, thirty years later. There’s some back-story about how this essay came to be written in my post eBook Week, Meta-Memoir.
After the Fire: A Personal Essay, Smashwords Edition. Enter coupon code BT55V to receive a %100 discount. (Free!)
Coming soon…
Bonnifer
A short story about a married office worker struggling with temptation and desire while flirting with an older woman on a sultry summer evening in Greenwich Village.
Coming soon…
The Couple
A young couple, on their last spring break, face an uncertain future. Family expectations, career choices, and their own uncertainties are driving them apart. In my blog post “Doomed Couples”, I wrote that every writer has a version of this story. This is mine.


These current-day price wars conducted by giant retailers remind me the the transformation of the business my father was in for forty years. He was, by profession, a pharmacist. He was also a businessman. He owned the neighborhood drugstore in our section of Elmhurst, Queens. After working his way through pharmacy school, serving in the Army during the Korean war, and then working in other people’s stores for a couple of years, managed to buy the neglected and rundown business in his own neighborhood. From the time he bought the business in the early fifties until he modernized it in the early sixties, the store looked very much like the one in Edward Hopper’s painting. Hopper is perhaps best known for his handling of light and the thing that strikes me about this painting is the light streaming out of the store into the darkened street. It’s 10 PM and everything is closed but the drugstore. The doorway in the shadow next to the store leads to the stairway up to the second floor where the druggist’s children are sleeping and his wife is waiting for him to close the store and come home.