Confused but Brave

Confused but Brave is a collection of twelve short stories and seven essays from the life of a man from Chicago, living now in New Orleans and Prague. They tell of his friends and his lovers, his children, his several families, his familiar passions -- baseball, music, visual arts, architecture, camping, literature -- presented not as memoir but as the intimate, gradual unfolding of a life's spiral. All the stories are to some extent autobiographical; two are fantasies for little children like those I told my daughter nearly forty years ago. My tone varies from the hopeful energy of "A Family Story" to the despair of "Henry's Child." Loss of love is the story in "Ed in Love"; Ed bears it with greater grace than I ever might. Ed is my hero in more ways than one. The essays explore problems in contemporary American life. "Remarkable People" is pure memoir.