Title: Goodnight Silky Sullivan
First published: 1995
Description: "Laurie Alberts' command of prose is exceptional, her characterizations vivid and compelling," said the Detroit Free Press of her first book. "Alberts has most certainly established herself as an author from whom great things may be expected." In this, her second book of fiction, Alberts explores the lives of a wide range of characters seeking to reinvent themselves in an effort to escape the past - or at least to understand it.

In "Between Revolutions," which Publishers Weekly calls a "hapless, hopeless yet exhilarating story," Grisha, a frustrated Soviet teacher in Leningrad, is consumed by long-suppressed dreams of freedom when he begins a romance with an American exchange teacher.

First drawn to her by a lust for information, he is soon consumed with desire: "He wanted to suck every drop of juice from her mysterious foreign life." In another story set in Russia, Kate, an American, is beguiled by the danger of an affair with a Russian ex-seaman that might ennoble her own humdrum existence. Not loving Kolya completely, but wanting desperately to be loved by him, Kate finally realizes that their lives and their cultures have conspired to keep them apart.

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In the title story of the collection, a young woman, Allie, takes stock of her life, trying to come to terms with a tough, tormented, sometimes explosive father whose only moment of tenderness is expressed by invoking the name of a racehorse as he strokes his daughter's silky mane. In the beautiful, bittersweet story "Blood Sand," a distraught investment analyst flees New York for a new and equally difficult life of poverty in a brilliantly rendered rural New Mexico.

There, among the pinons and junipers, he will learn the hard lessons of forgiveness. Whether bringing to life the quotidian details of the last days of Brezhnev's Russia, the grubby poverty of dying New England mill towns, or the brilliant, harsh sun of New Mexico mesas, Alberts writes with an easy grace that belies the depth of these compelling tales.
Subjects: New York Times reviewed
LC classification: PS3551.L264 G6 1995