Larry Duberstein: 9 books

At a young man’s funeral, the undertaker offers his thoughts on lifestyle, along with a hot tip on the big stakes race that afternoon. In another bizarre burial twist, two feuding misfit brothers speed across America in a battered Chevy, trying to fulfill their mother’s dying wish. Meanwhile,...

Postcards from Pinsk is the story of a middle-aged Beacon Hill shrink coming to grips with himself. The “postcard” is the catalyst for crisis—his wife of long standing is divorcing him. It appears she has good reason, yet as Orrin Summers wrestles with solitude, self-deception, and a general...

As he labored on his masterpiece Moby Dick in 1851, Herman Melville was a popular and charismatic young author. One year later, this Melville—successful, outgoing, knowable—had gone underground. His letters, previously witty and expansive, would, for the rest of his life, be brief and businesslike....

A midsummer morning, Brooklyn, 1955. Oscar Carnovsky, a respectable (yet hardly distinguished) middle-aged man, leaves for work in the usual fashion: takes his share of the morning paper, kisses his wife goodbye, and waves back as he turns the corner of Linden Boulevard. He has done it precisely this...

Five Bullets by Larry Duberstein is an extraordinary short novel about one man’s experience of the Holocaust from its beginnings in Europe to the end of his life more than 50 years later in the United States. Holocaust scholar and National Book Award winning author Theodore Rosengarten...

Eight years ago, readers were invited to accompany Maurice Locksley on his rounds, as he paid court to his wife, his ex-wife, and his mistress in dizzying succession. The Marriage Hearse, his account of that wild winter’s night, was judged “one of the funniest, smartest, and most generous novels...

Stanley Noseworthy is, at best, a serial monogamist. At worst, a faithless rake. Now his record-breaking long-term lover (“1001 better-than-Arabian nights”) Nina is fed up with his “inimitable bull%#$#” and threatening to end their relationship. “Show us there is some good in you,” Stanley’s...

At 5 P.M. on a snowy night, Maurice Locksley, sometime literary stud, stops off at a Boston pub and there, with a glass of beer, launches a 10 1/2 hour journey into the riskier regions of the heart. First he’s off to dinner with his wife and 4-year-old son . . . then on to an evening in the suburbs,...

Just turned forty and living alone, Tim Bannon is sliding comfortably into midlife crisis when his orphaned niece and nephew arrive on his doorstep. Though Tim loves these two children, he has his doubts about being in loco parentis. For starters, he is gay and the year is 1990—long before the age...