She Loved ME Once and Other Stories - Tapa dura

Lester Goran's second collection centers around a group of men and women in an Irish-American enclave in Pittsburgh, primarily during the years surrounding World War II, but extending at times into the eighties. With evocative settings and narratives ranging from the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy hilarity to richly detailed realism, Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places within the mundane affairs of ordinary men and women. Goran writes of characters in a time and place of relatively stable circumstances: the young woman who thinks her smile mesmerizes all manner of men in dangerous "Lorelei" fascination; three adventuresome youths who take on the responsibilities of working as professional pallbearers in a very strange cemetery; Light Culhane, who failed at every possible human endeavor except having a beautiful woman fall forever in love with him; the man who talked too much about his sexual liaisons and lived to regret it; Desmond's sister, who devises a rare medical program to save her dying brother; and other misfits, saints, braggarts, straight arrows, and geniuses.

Lester Goran is a professor of English at the University of Miami. His other publications include Tales from the Irish Club: A Collection of Short Stories (Kent State University Press, 1995), The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer (Kent State University Press, 1994), Outlaws of the Purple Cow and Other Stories (Kent State University Press, 1999), and nine novels, including Mrs. Beautiful, The Demon in the Sun Parlor, and The Keeper of Secrets.