When Stanley Berman, a Jewish New York attorney, is appointed Chief Counsel at a North Carolina University, he opts to share a house with his good friend, Thomas McClellan, a professor in the school's English Department. The men spend their evenings drinking wine, playing chess, and lamenting their ineptitude with women. Then the Professor, a Southern good old boy, former high school football lineman, and avid hunter, hatches a scheme to bring a young woman into the house, insisting that as a creative writing teacher, such women find him alluringly subversive and artistic. The Counselor is dubious but persuaded nonetheless—much to his detriment. The articulate but bumbling Counselor and Professor find themselves outwitted at every turn by Victoria, a young woman who is clever, inscrutable, and superb at finishing what she starts. She initiates passionate sexual encounters with the men, but as time goes on, what she demands in return becomes untenable. When she goes missing,...

A novel about a family even more dysfunctional than the one you grew up in. Will's Surreal Period is a richly satisfying tale—at times laugh-out-loud hilarious and at times deeply moving—that features a rollickingly dysfunctional family, a seemingly endless array of succulent foodstuffs, and a brain tumor that transforms a mediocre painter into a virtuoso. Now toss in a smidgen of BDSM and a few beguiling tidbits exploring brain chemistry and human evolution, and you have a story that will hook you fast and captivate you till the end. "Will's Surreal Period proves why works of fiction are high art. . . . Robert Steven Goldstein deftly converts our raw human foibles into emotive entertainment and, as he does, reminds us, sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously, who we are." —MICHAEL J. COFFINO, award-winning author of Truth Is in the House