Fiction. Unabashedly funny—at turns dirty, revolting, tender and sarcastic—Daniel S. Libman's stories bring us a new style that is part inner dialogue, part comic monologue—Grace Paley meets Charles Bukowski. Armed with a comic's wit and a poet's ear, Libman celebrates marriage by excoriating what it falls prey to and must overcome: adultery, lusts and longings, dalliances both real and imagined. Here we see the fantasies of the adulterer, the dark paranoid world of the cuckold, and surprisingly, the willingness of couples to stay together, with their tenuous, often funny steps forward after transgression. Taken together, these short works are a testament to the marriage and its demands of love, humor, and the sheer persistence of the human heart.

A widower celebrates the end of his life by preparing a fancy dinner for a call girl. A young opera singer finds her boyfriend is engaged to someone else. A man forces his wife to ride a tandem bike with him as penance for cheating. A man valiantly attempts to prevent his wife from selling their wedding dress at a garage sale.

Author City: DE KALB, IL USA

Daniel S. Libman is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for fiction as well as a Paris Review discovery Prize, now called the Plimpton Prize. His story "In the Belly of the Cat" has been anthologized many times and translated into several languages, including Italian and Russian. He has published stories and essays in many journals and magazines including Details, Other Voices, Columbia, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Santa Monica Review, and The Chicago Reader. Winner of a writing grant from the Illinois Arts Council, Dan is currently holed up in rural Illinois with his wife, the writer Molly McNett, two kids, a dog and a cat, and chickens too numerous to count.