ON THE BRAIN AND THE HEART
As we await the artist I hired to complete sketches that will accompany my stories, we have begun working on preliminaries to publication. Included are various elements of the marketing copy, a summary of the book being a most essential component. I had no idea how to go about summarizing seventeen diverse stories in a brief essay. Mim to the rescue. The following is a draft summary for Amazon.com.
Masterfully crafted fiction by a brain surgeon with an intimate understanding of the heart
In this intriguing, evocative collection of short stories, author Moris Senegor takes readers inside the minds and hearts of an eclectic cast of characters. They range from the lovable rogue Jarvis, an aspiring neurosurgeon who falls into mishaps even more than he does women’s beds; to the complex family circle in “The Windowsill,” whose lives are connected through a single person, now dead; to the couples (“Portofino,” “The Pinch”) harboring wistful fantasies for what might have been. A number of stories are set in the author’s native Turkey, while others, including “Appassionata,” are in off-the-beaten-path places in the Mediterranean. But it is the emotional landscape, with its unexpected twists, surprising turns, and startling bumps in the road, that will have readers coming back for the next story and the next.
In “On the Night Bus to Fethiye,” a young Turkish bus driver encounters more than one surprise thanks to a small dog in the cargo hold—and then surprises everyone, including himself, with the final route he takes. “Nash,” set in the Istanbul of the 1960s, mixes a fascination for vintage cars with a young boy’s promise to the impoverished driver who ferries him faithfully to school. “Royal Visit” and “The Savage” also capture moments in a young Turk’s life, while “Ronnie’s Tip” catches an unwitting immigrant teenager in the U.S. in the act of something he has no cultural reference for.
In “Marley’s Ghosts,” “Unlikely Friends,” and “Testicle Talk,” readers get to eavesdrop on some bizarre conversations. In “Surabaya,” they uncover the nobility of a seeming huckster. Lovers of Kafka will delight in the unsettling “Nightmare.” And lovers of chance encounters that can happily change lives will find “Appassionata” a satisfying symphony played out among two young men and a woman, in a small village in southern Italy.
In addition to being a writer and a neurosurgeon, Moris Senegor is a wine lover. In this debut collection of short stories, he has written stories—some playful, some poignant, others mysterious, and a few delectably bizarre—that should satisfy any number of fiction-lovers’ tastes. Readers will savor them.
