She Loved Me Once and Other Stories by Lester Goran 1997, 306 pp ISBN 0-87338-576-4 Cloth, $26.00 courtesy of our partner, Atlas Books Call (419) 281-1802 to order by phone.

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Lester Goran's first book of short stories, Tales from the Irish Club, was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as a “Notable Book of the Year 1996.” This second collection also centers around a group of men and women in an Irish-American enclave in Pittsburgh, primarily during the years surrounding World War II, but extending at times into the eighties.

With evocative settings and narratives ranging from the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy hilarity to richly detailed realism, Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places within the mundane affairs of ordinary men and women. With his mastery of language and images he shows again what Paul West has termed “the lunatic sadness of things.”

As the Pittsburgh Post—Gazette noted in its review of Tales from the Irish Club, “His many characters come alive with an immediacy and clarity that makes their stories seem like today's gossip.” She Loved Me Once and Other Stories is a worthy successor to that book.

Lester Goran is a professor of English at the University of Miami. His other publications include Tales from the Irish Club: A Collection of Short Stories (Kent State University Press, 1995), The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer (Kent State University Press, 1994), Outlaws of the Purple Cow and Other Stories (Kent State University Press, 1999), and nine novels, including Mrs. Beautiful, The Demon in the Sun Parlor, and The Keeper of Secrets.

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