Publisher's Synopsis
Their Magician is the long-awaited collection of stories by a writer admired by writers from coast to coast. In these fourteen stories, Broder introduces characters and situations that readers will find hard to put out of their minds. In 'The Insult,' Arnold Isaiah Hepplemeyer, an orthodontist, undergoes a crisis when he sees 'Hepplemeyer is an ass' scrawled on a kiosk. In 'Hospitality,' four young women sharing an apartment in Cambridge compete with one another to see who can bring home the most interesting guest, a competition that Penelope assumes she has won when she invites a notorious murderer to dinner. In 'Elena, Unfaithful,' Alexei Sazevitch, a womanizer for decades, causes his wife's death by announcing his retirement, and then must deal with his children's outrage when he informs them that she has not died, but run off with a lover. And in 'The Roofers,' two workers repairing a roof rush to save a man they observe trying to asphyxiate himself in his car. With a combination of comic lightness and gravitas that may remind the reader of Chagall as much as of Chekhov and Cheever, Gloria Kurian Broder shows us what it is like to live in America's cities and suburbs, creating characters who, in the face of loss, loneliness, self-doubt, and others' skepticism and hostility, strive to keep alive the spirit within them.
