Every Jew who lived through the Holocaust had a story worth telling, but not every Jew has been inclined to tell that story. Such was the case with Karel Bondy, a rising young structural engineer in Prague when the Nazis invaded his nation and began preparing the fortress town of Terezin to receive his people. Married and the father of three when he was taken there (and from there to Auschwitz), he was alone when luck allowed him to fight back, first with the partisans and later the Russian army. And he was alone when after the war he came to America to begin a new life as Carl Barry. What these experiences did to a strong yet sensitive man caught in the grip of the 20th century s greatest tragedy is at the heart of this extraordinary novel. And because Bondy/Barry was not eager to share those experiences, we must rely on his inquisitive American nephew Lewis to ferret out the details for us--and upon author Larry Duberstein to weave their tales together, in all the horror and sadness and, more unexpectedly, the beauty and humor. Karel Bondy is an unforgettable character whose story will by turns shock, intrigue, and amuse you.

Five Bullets

Larry Duberstein

Brimstone Corner Press

At 5 P.M. on a snowy night, Maurice Locksley, sometime literary stud, stops off at a Boston pub and there, with a glass of beer, launches a 10 1/2 hour journey into the riskier regions of the heart. First he's off to dinner with his wife and 4-year-old son... then on to an evening in the suburbs, where his ex-wife and teenage children wait... and then back to town for a postmidnight tryst with Maggie, his exuberant young mistress. Maurice, at forty, is poised on the brink of adventures yet untaken, but where he wanders may put him at risk, caught between the rock and hard places of love.

The Marriage Hearse

Literature & Fiction

United States

Permanent Press

A midsummer morning, Brooklyn, 1955. Oscar Carnovsky, a respectable (yet hardly distinguished) middle-aged man, leaves for work in the unusual fashion: takes his share of the morning paper, kisses his wife goodbye, and waves back as he turns the corner of Linden Boulevard. He has done it precisely this way five thousand times. This particular morning, however, he waves from the corner and is not seen again, nor is he heard from, for years. Decades later (at Oscar's funeral) his daybooks come to light -- a record of the missing years and of his life as The Invisible Mensch. This unremarkable man will soon become an unforgettable character as you accompany him on his flight through the 1950s in a highly original second novel from Larry Duberstein, whose earlier work, The Marriage Hearse, was hailed by the critics.

Carnovsky's Retreat

Just turned forty and living alone, Tim Bannon is sliding comfortably into midlife crisis when his orphaned niece and nephew arrive on his doorstep. Though Tim loves these two children, he has his doubts about being in loco parentis. For starters, he is gay and the year is 1990-long before the age of gay buddies on primetime TV. 1990 is a time of terror, a time when even perfectly nice people fear they will die from touching a gay friend. If they have one. Nor is it clear that Tim's surviving sister Erica and her husband Earl are perfectly nice people. Sexy, flaky, undirected Erica and redneck, unapologetically reactionary Earl (who, Tim is sure, shoots his dogs to simplify summer travel plans) have their own doubts about Tim's fitness and they enjoin a New Hampshire court to take the kids from him. As Tim marshals friends, colleagues, lawyers, and shrinks (Bannon's Queer Army of the Republic) to do battle against Earl and his folksy lawyer Merle, THE MT. MONADNOCK BLUES draws us deeper into an edgy, moving, and often hilarious family tale, played out against the backdrop of a glorious New England summer.

The Mt. Monadnock Blues

Humor & Satire

Stanley Noseworthy is, at best, a serial monogamist. At worst, a faithless rake. Now his record- breaking long-term lover ("1001 better-than-Arabian nights") Nina, is fed up with his "inimitable bull%#$#" and threatening to end their relationship. "Show us there is some good in you," Stanley's best friend urges. "Show us there is a brain." But Stanley's decisions do not tend to be made by his brain.He has profoundly mixed feelings about losing Nina, for he is nothing if not a profoundly mixed (up) fellow. Stanley is either a dedicated artist or a posturing fraud, a charming rogue or a shallow lothario, tragic victim or pathetic loser-- or all of the above. (Vote Online!" Stanley might well say to this, for he is always prepared to satirize his own life as sharply as the life around him.)Meanwhile, Stanley's beloved artist's cooperative, The "Hotel Beaux-Arts" (hence Bozarts) to its inhabitants, is also under threat. Since its endowment a quarter-century ago by the august Canterbury Institute of Technology, the "Bozarts" has had a frequently glorious, always rambunctious, character-rich history. Lately, mysteriously, it has been dwindling toward extinction.Stanley (who may or may not be paranoid) fears the reason for this is either that the Institute wants its building back for more profitable use, or that George W. Bush has declared an end to Art and Thought in America -- or both of the above.In The Day The Bozarts Died, we follow the many rich strands of Stanley's Tale through hilarity, absurdity, and wrenching sadness to an unexpectedly moving conclusion.

The Day the Bozarts Died

Cal and Lara are happily married, though (problematically) not to one another. And though they came of age in the sexual wilderness of the 1960s, neither is seeking to expand any sexual horizons now, 10 years later. Nevertheless, they find themselves in what each presumes to be an altogether trite situation--committed to monogamy and fidelity, yet so powerfully drawn together that their fall seems inevitable. The way out proposed by Lara, a "Twoweeks" carved out of their normal, predictable lives, is intended of course to take two weeks and be done with. What happens to these attractive, lively, storm-tossed souls before, during, and after the Twoweeks is the subject of Larry Duberstein's engaging new novel. Duberstein's first novel, The Marriage Hearse, while rife with surface irony and wit, was described by The New York Times Book Review as "above all a love story and a rather touching one at that." The same can be said of Duberstein's 8th novel, The Twoweeks, though it travels an arc of over 30 years, where The Marriage Hearse takes place in the course of a single white night. The Twoweeks too is "above all a love story" and, like most good ones, it is as much about the dilemmas of love as the romance.

The Twoweeks

Surprised by his wife's divorcing him, Orrin Summers, a fifty-nine-year-old Boston psychiatrist, is forced to reexamine his outlook on life

Postcards from Pinsk: A Novel

At a young man's funeral, the undertaker offers his thoughts on lifestyle, along with a hot tip on the big stakes race that afternoon. In another bizarre burial twist, two feuding misfit brothers speed across America in a battered Chevy, trying to fulfill their mother's dying wish.Meanwhile, the second craziest person in Casper, Wyoming, contemplates infidelity with the first, a young beauty who climbs through his window; a chance meeting with a nine-year-old boy on a bicycle finishes off a marriage; and a nude dancer in New Orleans, mistaken for a prostitute, is asked to take a check. ("The check is good, Catherine. Absolutely.")These are just a few of the compelling people and situations you will encounter in this wide-ranging selection of short fiction from Larry Duberstein. Some of Duberstein's characters do move in eccentric social circles and the patterns of his literary art make larger and even more eccentric circles. No one is exempted, however, from the clear truth of consequence: "The lizard's egg will hatch, and out will come the lizard."Humming with irony, humor, and an infectious enthusiasm for life at every level, these tales feature the same crystalline diction, the unique mix of sympathy, wit, and insight, that distinguish Larry Duberstein's highly acclaimed novels.

Eccentric Circles

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Books by Larry Duberstein