Coming Up Short

This is a multifaceted treat: a sparkling collection of T. V. LoCicero's best short fiction and non-fiction penned over the past five decades-14 stories, memoirs, essays and occasional pieces that are by turns brilliant, hilarious, moving and insightful. Together they offer a wonderful array of unlikely but vividly realized characters: --A colorful black caddie who plays one of the strangest rounds in the history of golf. --The mild, unassuming fellow often dubbed the greatest crime writer of our time. --A Hall of Fame athlete whose decades of triumph ended in sudden death on a Manhattan street. --A comfortable suburban matron who pays a charitable call on the squalid inner-city room of her long-time maid. --The Little League dad whose compulsive flirtation with Lady Luck may cost him his thumbs, fingernails or the soul of his son. --An earnest young reporter who thinks the witty, gorgeous gal he just met is too good to be true...until she claims to adore him, and then he's got one small problem. --A meddling spinster so perversely intent on helping her eccentric old housemate that nothing good can ever come of it. --The author himself back in the day, divorced, broke, living in a refashioned garage and looking for a job that pays.