Neptune and Surf and Other Stories Author:Marilyn Jaye Lewis Three Explicit Novellas — The title story is set in gritty, ramshackle 1950s Coney Island, a squalid, shabby land of dreams that lost its glitter long ago. It's a neighborhood where the residents scratch out a living as best they can, and two lovers have a few brief moments of bliss and are moved by the power of life. In &quo... more »t;The Mercy Cure," two lesbian ex-nuns have lost their church, but not their belief. Their comfortable relationship is disturbed by a former student who has kept alive her raging schoolgirl crush on the former Sister Margaret-Phillip. The girl, drawn into their midst, yearns for a man's touch, even as she's driven to satisfy her obsession with her ex-teacher. What is revealed is a richly complex relationship of love and hate, punctuated with laughter and tears... The final story, "Gianni's Girl," is also a story of faith -- the belief that even in the most forbidding circumstances, one can survive and triumph. Victoria gets involved with Paulie, a minor mobster, in a world in which women are used and bartered to satisfy male debts of honor. Victoria is forced to engage in the most degrading sexual acts. In the midst of this depravity, she meets Gianni - an unlikely hero, an innocent with boyish charm, whose notions of love are straightforward; a man who knows nothing of sin and guilt.« less