The Thief and other Stories - Paperback

by Michael D. Rectenwald (Author)

"Bobby Gould meets Raskolnikov in Michael Rectenwald's story collection, which pops around from New York to Florida to L.A. to Pittsburgh. No location, however, is rendered as vividly as the minds of the collection's tormented protagonists. Guilt, remorse, self-loathing: that's what these guys eat for breakfast. They're a rogue's gallery of drunks, debtors, failed husbands, failed poets, failed professors, and if they're not under arrest they think they should be, or want to be, plead to be, or remember when they were. They lust, connive, accuse, prevaricate, contemplate murder, contemplate suicide. But they're capable of a kind of crude poetry. One says, 'Misery loves company, but ecstasy and despair have one thing in common; they want to be left alone.' Another says, 'I was going to pick up my second wife's stepdaughter of her third marriage. That was supposed to feel normal.' Normal in Rectenwald's America is, at best, hair-pulling anxiety, and at worst, much worse. One thinks of the forlorn losers of Raymond Carver, stuck in the predicaments of Franz Kafka. Throughout, one laughs. With recognition. To keep from crying." -- Tim Tomlinson, fiction editor, Ducts (www.ducts.org); co-founder, New York Writers Workshop

Author Biography

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. has taught writing and cultural history at New York University since 2008. He received a B.A. in English from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.A. from Case Western Reserve University, and a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. At age twenty, Michael was an apprentice poet to Allen Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to publishing numerous essays in his field of cultural studies and the history of science, he writes occasional poetry, fiction, screenplays, and political commentary. In 1991, he published the Eros of the Baby Boom Eras (poetry). His website is at www.michaelrectenwald.com. His political commentary can be found at www.legitgov.org.