Raphael D. Silver

Thirty-something Isabelle spends her time going from her tiny, solitary West Side apartment to that of her grandmother on the Lower East Side. While her grandmother plots to find her a romantic match, Isabelle is courted by a married, worldly author, Anton, yet can't seem to shake the down-to-earth appeal of Sam, a pickle vendor.

The staff of the Back Bay Mainline, a Boston underground newspaper that rose to prominence in the 1960s, struggles with the shifting social climate of the '70s amid rumors that the paper is about to be sold to a media giant.

A forty-year marriage begins to unravel when the husband brings home a pet fish that he wants to keep in the bathtub.

A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.

Chilly is "top con" on the yard, a title that gives him absolute power. Power to make the rules. Power to kill. When a young con confronts Chilly's power, he learns the vicious price of defiance.

A Peace Corps volunteer, bubbling o'er with idealism, learns to his delight that he has been assigned to a remote, backward Colombian village. When he arrives, he is confused by the cynical attitude of his predecessor