Hellbent Men and Their Cities Author:Susan Dodd With each book, Susan Dodd moves in surprising new directions, unsettling and surprising her reader thought never failing in the end to astonish, to amaze, to win new fans. Hell-Bent Men and Their Cities, her first collection of stories since Old Wives' Tales (winner of the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction), makes clear her magical... more » ability to step into the lives and hearts of others with delicacy, wit, and, always, affection. She writes of:
--a daughter coping with her father's illness and the sudden, subtle reversal of responsibility and choice;
--a young woman learning to navigate the distance her boyfriend places between himself and her family;
--two old men, best friends, struggling to confide in each other the secret fears of old age;
--a professor of Judaic Thought who, at night, becomes a student of the Talmud, a fervent and timid disciple of the Master;
--a teenager watching her parents' lives come to halt, wondering where to start hers;
--a woman drawn from the country to the city, where she discovers the underworld of her heart.
The men and women in Dodd's stories are seekers--looking for a place where they feel at home, where they can be the selves they aspire to be. They are searching for the elusive wholeness that allows them brief, startling moments of self-recognition.« less