cover image Shadow Self & Other Tales

Shadow Self & Other Tales

Helen Duberstein, Helen Daberstein. Ghostdance Press, $15.95 (126pp) ISBN 978-0-939520-09-1

The title story of this scrappy collection from poet and off-off-Broadway playwright Duberstein (The Shameless Old Lady) traces the 20-year, on-again, off-again affair between a woman and a crusty, older and married professor. Other stories tread similar ground: young women are continually infatuated with older men who treat them badly. What Duberstein's theme lacks in originality, she makes up for in sincerity, zooming in so closely that the stories read like sensitive, overwrought letters to a close friend. The narrator of ""When I Dyed My Hair in Venice"" mourns the son, now dead, who was taken from her shortly after his birth and raised by the wife of her lover. ""Ethan"" explores this material from another vantage point; this time the birth-mother must watch from afar as the child is reared by her ex and his spouse. Her only recourse is to start fresh, pursuing new relationships and the small kindnesses of chance encounters. According to these intense, often complex eight stories (which Duberstein illustrates with 20 of her own semi-figurative line drawings), the sexes are very much at war and unlikely to call a truce any time soon. (Nov.)