SWEET EMBRACEABLE YOU:
COFFEE-HOUSE STORIES
These entertaining stories (defining diverse) spin a fast read: edgy in some tales, nostalgic in others, lustrous always. Lammy Provocateur Fritscher is the best kind of award-winning author: one who disappears behind his characters, dialog, and textured plots. Here is human love, new and ageless, in all its tender genders, comic banana slips, identity ironies, and family silences. The subtext: people crave, not sex, but intimacy and connection. Stories include: the breathless satire and gay wedding story, “Mrs. Dalloway Went That-A-Way”; the reflexive college-faculty comedy, “The Unseen Hand in the Lavender Light”; the Alaskan cruise-ship adventure, “The Story Knife”; the Hitchcockian suspense-thriller, “The Barber of 18th and Castro”; the hospital-issue drama, “Silent Mothers, Silent Sons”; and the tale of two couples all surrogately wrong for each other in “Sweet Embraceable You Cover” (told twice here: as brilliant little story and as snappy one-act play first staged in San Francisco). This fresh collection of diverse entertainments also includes an easy-to-read indie screenplay, “Duchess: Berlin 1927.” Appealing. Accessible. Amazing.