cover image Talking to the World and Other Stories: And Other Stories

Talking to the World and Other Stories: And Other Stories

Dennis Lynds. John Daniel & Company Books, $18.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-1-880284-10-0

Lynds's powerful, beautifully crafted stories speak of the tenuousness of interpersonal relations, and of the courage of ordinary people navigating life's traumas. In the fiercely lyrical ``Marriage, Death, Solitude & Confusion,'' the mundane reality of a down-and-out New York couple is contrasted with the rapturous deathbed visions of a boy hospitalized with leukemia who believes in heaven and reincarnation and is eager to die. ``The Lion and the Mountain Man'' charts a subservient army wife's metamorphosis into a feminist, divorced entrepreneur whose recurrent erotic dreams of a lion symbolize her repressed emotional needs. Similarly, the heroine of ``Sylvestre and Dolores,'' a poor Guatemalan woman barely able to feed her two children and widowed by a death squad, makes her own escape-to California, with a false passport, only to meet tragedy through her affair with an emigre drug lord. In the title story, a California zoo veterinarian copes with divorce and a dying koala and befriends his neighbor, Mr. Joachim, a German immigrant and Mahler devotee whose family was killed in Nazi death camps. Mr. Joachim hangs in his window huge hand-painted signs bearing cryptic philosophical messages-a gesture of Lynds's characters, struggling to communicate, to be heard, to matter, in a largely indifferent world. (June)