Odd-job queen Starshine Hart is about to go on somebody else’s perfect date. At 29, the usually carefree Starshine has realized that it is easier to start sleeping with a man than to stop. Her lovers include one of the last underground members of the Weathermen and the dilettante heir to a lawn chair magnate. Both men have staked their romantic future on her. Her only respite is her impending dinner with the nonthreatening but unattractive tour guide Larry Bloom. But Larry, too, has a stake in her future. He has written a book about their impending dinner in which he fantasizes about Starshine’s life on the day he wins her heart. Juxtaposing moments from Larry’s guided tour of New York City on the June day of his “dream date” with excerpts from the novel in which he imagines Starshine’s concurrent escapades, this inventive structure weaves a highly imaginative love story across all five boroughs. Provocative, funny, and keenly observed, an imagined pilgrimage through the underbelly of Gotham becomes a bold new voice in contemporary American fiction.

The Biology of Luck

Literature & Fiction

Appel, Jacob M.

Literary

Elephant Rock Books

A couple adopt a depressed hedgehog; a mother is seduced by the father of her daughter's imaginary friend; a man kidnap's his ex-wife's pet turtle. In eight tragicomic stories, Einstein's Beach House features ordinary men and women rising to life's extraordinary challenges.

Einstein's Beach House

Pressgang

The stories in The Magic Laundry stemfrom Jacob M. Appel's work as a psychiatristin New York City, and his particularinterest in how ordinary peoplecope with extraordinary challenges.He hopes these stories will encouragehis readers to place themselvesin the shoes of his protagonists and toask themselves how they would handlethe tribulations confronted by hischaracters. What would you do if yourdaughter returned home from collegewith a stolen baboon?

The Magic Laundry

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Snake-Nation-Press

Fiction. The eight stories in THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET are smart, funny, and humane. In "Bioethics for Dunces," which takes its name from the title of a college course its main character Leonard teaches, Leonard suddenly finds that academic and abstract issues are all too real when his own daughter goes on life support. He and his wife disagree about what to do. A quote from this story speaks to the philosophical quandary that many of these stories explore: "The underlying problem was that Leonard's situation lacked a governing social convention." Many of Appel's stories feature characters grappling with moral, ethical, and philosophical situations that lack governing social conventions. His stories show how ethics--something that sounds like an academic abstraction--can be concrete, visceral, and immediate. With compassion, wit, humor, and intelligence, these stories explore the gray areas of our lives. Echoes of myth, fairy tale, and fable flavor them, underscoring the eternal nature of both the human condition and storytelling itself. In a starred review Kirkus Reviews described Jacob Appel's THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET as a collection of "well- constructed stories that sharply but compassionately observe people trying to make sense of life's disruptions" and that "come to...thoughtful, often wrenching conclusions."

The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street

United States

Howling Bird Press

In the spirit of the New York Times bestselling A Man Called Ove, this is the heartwarming story of a man who decides to end his life before he’s too old—but then begins to reconsider when he faces complications from the world around him. In an effort to delay the frailty and isolation that comes with old age, psychiatrist Millard Salter decides to kill himself by the end of the day—but first he has to tie up some loose ends. These include a tête-à-tête with his youngest son, Lysander, who at forty-three has yet to hold down a paying job; an unscheduled rendezvous with his first wife, Carol, whom he hasn’t seen in twenty-seven years; and a brief visit to the grave of his second wife, Isabelle. Complicating this plan though is Delilah, the widow with whom he has fallen in love in the past few months. As Millard begins to wrap up his life, he confronts a lifetime of challenges during a single day—and discovers that his family has a big surprise for him as well.

Millard Salter's Last Day

Humor & Satire

GALLERY BOOKS

On the outside, Dr. Jeremy Balint is a pillar of the community: the youngest division chief at his hospital, a model son to his elderly parents, fiercely devoted to his wife and two young daughters. On the inside, Dr. Jeremy Balint is a high-functioning sociopath--a man who truly believes himself to stand above the ethical norms of society. As long as life treats him well, Balint has no cause to harm others. When life treats him poorly, he reveals the depths of his cold-blooded depravity. At a cultural moment when the media bombards us with images of so-called sociopaths who strive for good and criminals redeemed by repentance,The Mask of Sanity offers an antidote to implausible tales of evil gone right. In contrast to fictional predecessors like Dostoyevesky's Raskolnikov and Camus' Meursault, Dr. Balint is a man who already has it all --and will do everything in his power, no matter how immoral, to keep what he has.

The Mask of Sanity

Permanent Pr Pub Co

Fiction. "I don't know how Jacob Appel does it. I'm not talking about the fact that Appel is a physician and attorney and teacher in addition to the work that he does with a pencil in his hand. I'm talking, too, about the stories that he writes, stories that are uniquely his own, written with equal doses of heft, hilarity and heart. AMAZING THINGS ARE HAPPENING HERE is an apt title for a collection such as this, filled as it is with a sense of invention and evention or eventiveness that makes Jacob Appel about as original of a voice that you're likely to find if this is the kind of looking you are looking at this book to find."--Peter Markus "In his new short story collection, AMAZING THINGS ARE HAPPENING HERE, Jacob Appel renders our post 9/11 world through a variety of personalities, each narrating their unique and startling stories. Meet the shy high school student with a crush on a girl dying of leukemia, the mother whale who beaches to save her offspring, the search for the VA hospital's lunatic who goes missing and never returns, and more. We are in the hands of a patient, master artist who watches the world unfolding around him, sees its protagonists' inadvertent mistakes, and observes them endeavoring to reclaim their dignity. These stories lift us far above the realm of entertainment, and instead enrich and enliven the psyche's oceanic heights and depths."--Marilyn Krysl

Amazing Things Are Happening Here

Black Lawrence Press

Fiction. "Another title for Jacob Appel's engrossing new story collection could be what one character calls 'a conspiracy of fantasies.' Characters imagine rekindling romances from the distant past, pursue prestigious apprenticeships and dramatic deaths, even attend the funerals of movie stars in order to avoid or infuse meaning into their own ordinary losses and suffering. Appel portrays these characters with such compassion that we willingly join the conspiracies, recognizing ourselves in every effort to understand the sum and value of human lives. These are wise and achingly beautiful stories."--Chauna Craig "WINTER HONEYMOON is a remarkable collection, full of Appel's keen depictions of human interactions in their most intricate subtleties. Many of the stories manage that ever-elusive quality of great short fiction: a novelistic scope miraculously fitted into a handful of pages. And there is the weight of history in all of these stories, of characters who have lives far beyond the glimpses we are given. The prose manages to dazzle throughout as well, though without ever drawing attention to itself. Appel is a genuine stylist is the vein of Salter or Munro, though with flourishes all his own."--Brad J. Felver "Short stories are normally the territory of literary tricksters like de Maupassant, O. Henry and anyone with an MFA or a sinecure in TV, sleight-of-hand artists know their ending before they begin building a careful scrim to obscure the reveal. Unlike these showbiznicks, Appel starts from one character, one phrase, even one key word and lets his story tell itself, so the author is as much ambushed by the outcome as his awe-struck readers. There is only one word to describe these nine tales of humans trapped within their own humanity: magisterial. No one writes like Jacob Appel."--Hesh Kestin "Jacob M. Appel's stories are more than just slices of life; they contain entire worlds. In smart, sharp, penetrating prose he draws the reader into not just the complicated modern lives of his protagonists, but their struggles, hopes, dreams and frustrations. Middle aged men and women dealing with elderly parents, marriages under strain, illnesses, and difficult children form the central conflicts, and are universal in their pathos. Appel manages to make the extraordinary plausible and the poignant humorous. These stories will delight and destroy you; you won't be able to put them down."--Allison Amend "From a widow pursuing an old flame to an architect caught in a collapsing relationship, WINTER HONEYMOON reminds us that life is fleeting but love, in all its forms, is a survivor. These are stories of sometimes quiet, sometimes incredible, and always complex lives that shout at us in their telling. With Jacob Appel's devilish eye for detail, the stakes grow, the plots turn, and the reader is hit in the head as much as the heart. These are as much affirmations as they are stories, and this is an adventurous and accomplished collection by any measure."--R. Dean Johnson

Winter Honeymoon

A magician's parrot recommends against donating a kidney to his girlfriend. Inside an antique grandfather clock, a dying child explores Ancient Athens. Rural Virginia is swept by an epidemic of human resurrections. An alien disguised as a Latvian chef opens unwittingly his restaurant opposite an abortion clinic. Jacob M. Appel's Miracles and Conundrums takes us to a world of hope and desperation, where everything is possible, but so much seems far beyond reach.

Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets

Genre Fiction

In his ninth book and fifth collection of stories, Jacob M. Appel introduces readers to a diplomat's wife who attempts to seduce her chimney sweep through Norwegian lessons, a minister whose dead wife is romantically involved with Greta Garbo, and a landlord menaced by a rent-delinquent mime.

Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana

Short Stories & Anthologies

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Books by Appel, Jacob M.