Böcker av Tom Tolnay

With an increasing multitude of Greeks stomping around metropolitan New York, the author noticed many of them seemed to be employed as corporals of the service industry-park attendants, apartment painters, supermarket clerks, and, especially, dishwashers, waitresses, and short-order cooks. This circumstance led him to wonder: How did it happen that these custodians, busboys, and counter girls ended up being the last remnants of the ancient architects of Western Civilization?To explore this question, he began writing storychapters, which followed the exploits of one Greek family transplanted in Brooklyn, NY, as it wrestled to make sense of life in America from the 60s to the end of the 20th century. He used family feasts at Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, a wedding, and a funeral as milestones in their journey, and labeled these feasts profane because of the unholy manner in which they were conducted. The profane feasts herein are narrated by Alexandros Dropolous, Jr., as he passes from childhood to young manhood and, ultimately, to his own wedding feast and the baptism of his son.Whether their adventure had been carefully planned or pursued intuitively, the author believed this family of Greeks in America was using their classical history as a kind of modern-day Trojan horse. The idea was not to topple our government which, after all, is held together by Greco-Roman ideas, but to replace their own lost greatness with the American dream by inserting themselves, patiently and unobtrusively, into one household, one coffee shop, one school, one house of worship at a time.

While farce is essentially a theatrical mechanism, in this book far-fetched measures are rendered in fictional prose through the idiosyncratic perspectives of a life-long librarian, Eric Binde, in Bradstreet, Massachusetts, and a part-time high school English teacher, Jasper Keats, in Long Island, New York. Each is devoted to reading dog-eared books while attempting to pursue personal views of living in conflict with less-than-obliging antagonists.In these two novellas, author Tom Tolnay uses farcical premises carried out by whimsical characters for comic effect in order to consider two intriguing notions related to the old books they like to read: (1) How literature can impact everyday lives in meaningful ways, (2) How poetry shared by couples in love may lead to a deeper intimacy in their relationship.

Love in the Shadows of Mountains eavesdrops on the love lives of Adirondack residents and visitors, detailing what happens among lovers while camping, hiking, fishing, snowshoeing, canoeing, or merely getting from one day to the next. These short fictions are set throughout New York's north country, including Cranberry Lake, Glens Falls, Gloversville, Inlet, Lake Placid, Northville, Old Forge, Otter Lake, Saranac Lake, Saratoga, Speculator, Tug Hill.While the focus of these stories is on love between couples (married, engaged, unmarried, gay and straight), it also engages alternate manifestations of love: a young woman falls in love with the forest, an old man's life-long love for a mountain, familial love, and love for things like a father's ancient snowshoes, private ownership of guns, and children's love for a dog.Through well-meaning, if flawed characters-many of whom are locked into economic shortfalls, substance abuse, unstable employment, health issues-these stories collectively make the assumption that the rugged terrain in which these relationships take hold has unexpected, sometimes humorous, sometimes dark, sometimes life-altering consequences. The lovers' rough-cut entanglements stand in stark contrast to the simple natural splendors which surround Adirondackers-six million acres of forest encompassing hundreds of peaks, thousands of waterways, and too many miles of trails to follow in one lifetime; the disparity between the feral and human dominions lies at the heart of these stories.