Elynia

Elynia is a lyrically-charged debut that dissects the moments that make up the lives of its interrelated characters.  The title story examines four separate generations of nameless characters whose varied struggles unfold in a kaleidoscope of human need. An immigrant shoe-man works away his life in a dying town, witnessing his son wrongly arrested by a man whose shoes he regularly shines.  And that son watches his friend betray the memory of a departed mother by stealing her now-sacred makeup for a drunken joke.  That friend then marries a waitress who secretly loves another man who is perpetually stuck atoning for his past by meticulously refurbishing a house.  The atoner was once a painter whose works were rejected by his one love, the granddaughter of the woman who boards the hapless shoe-man after a fire takes everything from him.  Being the only one named, Elynia paradoxically emerges as the greater obscurity that envelopes the nameless yet distinguished