The Valley is never short on writers and new works in every genre, so this group of books is but a small sampling of some current offerings in fiction (and, in one case, the “largely fictional”) from area authors.
Breakfast with Buddha
by Roland Merullo
The skeptical protagonist of Merullo’s novel ends up giving his sister’s guru a ride from New York to North Dakota, and so matches wits and even miniature golf games with a robed monk. Merullo has previously two-putted with the deity in Golfing with God: A Novel of Heaven and Earth.
Luminous Fish
by Lynn Margulis
Margulis, a UMass professor in the department of geosciences, mixes fiction and science writing in this series of linked stories. The tales, which the book jacket declares “largely fictional,” examine the very human passions in a world of empirical research.
Kuperman’s Fire and Wrestling With Angels
by John J. Clayton
Clayton’s novel Kuperman’s Fire is the story of an entrepreneur who becomes privy to the dangerous information that the merger his company is about to engage in will join them to a corporation responsible for illegal chemical weapons sales, provoking a crisis on many fronts, including Kuperman’s coming to grips with his heritage. Wrestling With Angels is a collection of most of Clayton’s widely praised short fiction.
At the Copa
by Marisa Labozzetta
At the Copa is a collection of stories examining everything from a “sexual panic” brought on by the visit of a knife saleswoman to the reuniting of a World War II couple 50 years later. Labozzetta has been praised as a chronicler of Italian-American life.