| abstract |
Roadside America is a collection of short stories about the living in the United States
in a period of unprecedented cultural change and turmoil. It explores American
chicanery of all sorts, including exceptionalism, manipulation, surveillance, racism,
sexism, class warfare, violence, abuse, and greed. A hallmark of the collection is that
many stories are connected to historical events and places, such as life during the Cold
War, the panoptic Presidio Modelo prison in Cuba, expatriate life in 1970s Iran, the 2016
Presidential election, E-commerce's strangle of small enterprise, and Jeff Epstein's
pedophile empire. We visit these issues in short stories like tourist sites on an old-time
road trip, and what we find is often not pretty. Yet, particularly in some of the later
stories, influenced by the cultural pushback against the more nihilist aspects of postmodernism, characters may attain some degree of redemption.
Some of the stories are open ended in nature, and the reader is invited to actively
share in the process of interpretation. A watercolor illustration precedes each story,
inviting the reader into the story through image in addition to word. A Tour Guide to
Roadside America follows the collection, offering details on the stories' sources and
underlying themes, as well as additional personal reflections.
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