“Brilliantly observant poetry that captures a dark moment in our recent history.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
A lethal plague sweeps the globe. Millions have died. Survivors are confined to their homes.
Gabriel passes his time in a small New York apartment on the city's Upper West Side. During the plodding solitude of the lockdown, he observes several strangers in their nearby apartments. As he watches them struggle to survive a world at risk of extinction, he wonders about their lives—where they're from, what they value, how they're coping with a deadly contagion. All alone, he develops a vague yet important connection to these people, an affection for those who are struggling to survive isolation, fear and looming death.
Told in powerful, spellbinding free verse, Gabriel's observations grow deeper and more elaborate as the endless days pass. But when he and a woman from across the street begin to watch each other from afar, his imagination begins to collide with the bleak reality of the times.
Jackson Heights Press
"Riveting drama and sensuous prose make for an unforgettable love story." —KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
A young Cuban woman passes her nights dancing in a seedy Florida strip club. A Russian orphan loses everything, then builds a new and prosperous life for himself in New York. An American woman struggles to maintain her hope and dignity after a life-changing accident.
As their lives become unexpectedly intertwined, Perla, Julian and Sophie are forced to confront their suffering and reimagine their futures in surprising and unconventional ways.
A Cuban Russian American Love Story inhabits the lives of three wounded people who attempt to turn tragedy into beauty—and discover that love, forgiveness and healing can sometimes be found in the most unlikely places.
Jackson Heights Press (previously published as Troika by Penguin/Amy Einhorn Books)
“An electrifying read. Pelzman plunges us deep into the lives of his characters, makes us feel their joys and sorrows on a visceral level, and beautifully renders the mysteries of love.”
New York Times bestselling
author of Turn of Mind
“I. Love. This. Book. It’s fucking fantastic. Poignant, painful, impeccably realized, and ultimately joyful. I am so grateful to Adam Pelzman for creating this gem of a world.”
author of LOVE AND TREASURE
“What a great gallop through the landscape of the human heart, what a brilliant, astonishing modern love story, what a beautiful pair of heroines... what a ride to a complex and satisfying redemption, what a glorious testimony to the way damage can become a lovely destiny, what a book!”
Bobby Walser’s tragic childhood has left him a man frozen in time and mired in a world of his own making—one that has little in common with reality. Genteel and old-fashioned, his manners and habits are more suited to an aristocrat from a Chekhov play than to a young man on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Haunted by his failure to live up to the legacy of his great father, Walser’s sense of ineffectuality is compounded when he suffers a series of deflating professional setbacks. He’s baffled by the people around him, and his only solace is the hope of a romance—conducted via handwritten letters—with a mysterious woman who may not even exist.
As his despair with twenty-first century life reaches a breaking point, Walser bristles at a newly constructed sculpture that represents everything he loathes about these times. Realizing that he has more to care about—and fight for—outside himself, he marches toward a final showdown with this towering symbol of oppressive technology.
Jackson Heights Press
Set against the backdrop of the Newark riots in 1967, a teenage Benjamin Baum leaves the city to spend the summer at an idyllic lake in northern New Jersey. While fishing from his grandparents’ dock, the dead body of a beloved neighbor floats to the water’s surface—a loss that shakes this Jewish community and reveals cracks in what appeared to be a perfect middle-class existence. Haunted by the sight of the woman’s corpse, Ben stubbornly searches for clues to her death, infuriating friends and family who view his unwelcome investigation as a threat to the comfortable lives they’ve built. As Ben’s suspicions mount, he’s forced to confront the terrifying possibility that his close-knit community is not what it seems to be—that, beneath a façade of prosperity and contentment, darker forces may be at work.
Jackson Heights Press
About
Born: 47.6613, -122.4171
Raised: 40.8648, -74.2582
Favorite Place as a Child: 40.9207, -74.5125
"Art, at those moments when it feels most like art—when we feel most alive, most alert, most triumphant—is less like a cocktail party than a tank full of sharks." —John Gardner, The Art of Fiction.
"One day you'll look back on this and laugh . . . or not." —On dealing with adversity: cherished advice from my wise but warped grandmother.
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