The Fogman and Other Stories

(Hardback)

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Set in the grungy New York City of the 1970s and '80s, these stories convey a sense of the enchantment that lurks on the flip side of every moment, as if the meaning of life were hidden within the static being blasted out of the loudspeakers on a subway platform, or a scrap of newspaper preserved under ice on a cold winter's day.

A pointless job selling advertising for a community shopper in Brooklyn turns into a journey through a landscape of grotesque puppet-like humans and a head-on collision with evil. A girl trying to save the boy she loves from his disabling infatuation with his uncle, a Holocaust survivor who struck it rich as a merchant on Orchard Street, is defeated by a world to which she could never belong. A dedicated champion of social justice talks herself into believing that the man she finds sexually repulsive is a perfect fit for her perfectly ordered life.

In a voice laced with irony and antic joy, Rosaler glides with deceptive ease from the comic to the tragic to the absurd and back again, introducing us to a vivid and varied cast of characters, many of whom cannot face the truth about themselves and what they are doing with their lives.

Reviews

Maxine Rosalers stories are both hard-edged and comic, both laced with despair and hopeful against all expectation. New York City is the setting, a struggle to prosper in the face of bad choices and deeply ingrained perversity is the theme. Constant, however, is a narrative voice that proves irresistible, and a craftsmans approach to the construction of these contemporary parables. C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic

An engrossing and compassionate collection showing motherhood in its most unrelenting form.Kirkus Reviews

Rosaler writes of Mimis ongoing struggle from firsthand experience and instills in her protagonist such fierce resolve to do all she can for her son while simultaneously limning awkward episodes with ironic humor; the reader becomes immersed in all that the diagnosis of autism in ones child must entail.Booklist

Author Bio

Maxine Rosalers novel Queen for a Day, was nominated for The Kirkus Prize. The Jewish Book Council chose it to be one of ten fiction books included in its 2021 list of recommended books. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Stories of hers have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, Fifth Wednesday, storySouth, Green Mountains Review and other literary magazines and cited in editions of Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonfiction. One was a finalist for the Nelson Algren Awards.