NEW YORK STORIES is a collection of short stories about life in New York City as it lived by the middle- and lower-middle-class people who make up most of its population.  It is a life very different and much less glamorous than the one depicted in movies or television shows.  This is not a Madison Avenue campaign designed to lure tourist dollars to the “Big Apple”!  This is the dark, gritty, vulgar, and sometimes disgusting reality of the place.

Dark, gritty, vulgar, disgusting. Wow.
Urban readers will like because it reflects – refreshingly – the reality of their lives; rural readers will like it because it provides a satisfying confirmation of their suspicions about what they have always been told is the “sophisticated” view of life they ought to have; and intellectuals—real intellectuals—will adore it because it exposes a brand of stupid political correctness.

Tell us about the urban dwellers in your stories.
They are mostly middle- and lower-middle-class New Yorkers struggling to live their lives with some decency and comfort in a place where the odds are stacked against them.  In a real sense they are trapped: their jobs are here—and if they lose those jobs they can most easily find other jobs here—but these jobs will always only provide them with the means to survive, never to flourish.   Year by year the hard life of the city grinds away at whatever stock of kindness they started out with; makes them cold and hard and ruthless.  They are also Americans living at a time when the standard of living for all Americans has changed for the bitterly worse and when “security” has come to mean one thing—wealth; which by its very nature must be ever beyond reach of the majority, and thus add its large bit of dissatisfaction to social unrest.

Complete this sentence for us: if you like _________________, you’ll love New York Stories.
the off-beat, the ruthlessly accurate, the trenchantly satirical, the idealistic and politically incorrect

Tell us a bit about yourself.
Please … I have nothing to say here.  I don’t know what to say about myself.  I am the most boring person you can imagine.

Do you have a website where we can keep up with your work?
http://home.earthlink.net/~stone.tower5/nystories/nystories.html.

How can we follow you on Twitter and/or Facebook?
@stpress.