Dancing with Dasein and Other Stories by Morganstern, 2024 Mark NEUF

In this collection of fourteen stories---mostly set among working folks in the Hudson River Valley of New York---music, food, philosophy, and magic weave through tales that are by turns gritty, aching, and comical. Characters grapple with unfulfilled dreams in a dizzying, often alien culture. Meet a Bronx Italian Zen master with a baby and an ex-football-star partner...a young curator assigned to coddle an infamous avant-garde artist whose assistant threatens her marriage...a Homer scholar who disappears in a blizzard over a stone wall, never to be seen again...a failed graduate student who nearly gets paralyzed delivering a case of gourmet cat food to his Heidegger professor to settle a vague psychic debt...a reincarnating Ancient Egyptian chef who travels thousand of years from the banks of the Nile to a surf-crazed town in Southern California to open a bakery...and others. All are drawn with empathy and wry humor, observed through a sharp lens as they wrestle and waltz with the blunt challenge of being human---Dancing with Dasein.

.