front cover of Between Camelots
Between Camelots
David Harris Ebenbach
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Winner of the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Between Camelots is about the struggle to forge relationships and the spaces that are left when that effort falls short.  In the title story, a man at a backyard barbecue waits for a blind date who never shows up.  He meets a stranger who advises him to give up the fight; to walk away from intimacy altogether and stop getting hurt. The wisdom—or foolhardiness—of that approach is at the heart of each of these stories.  In “I’ll Be Home,” a young man who has converted to Judaism goes home for Christmas in Miami, and finds that his desire to connect to his parents conflicts with his need to move on. “The Movements of the Body” introduces us to a woman who believes that she can control the disintegration of her life through a carefully measured balance of whiskey and mouthwash. These are stories about loss and fear, but also about the courage that drives us all to continue to reach out to the people around us.

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front cover of The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy
The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy
and other stories
David Ebenbach
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
EXCERPT
There was one guy we didn't invite to the orgy. We invited everyone else: Solaire because she's crazy and John and Walt because they're both so good-­looking and they're dating anyway, and we invited Amy because everybody just loves Amy. We even invited Miranda just because she's the jealous type, and since her sister was in town we threw the door open to her sister, too. But there was this one guy we didn't invite.

The stories in The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy—funny, surprising, compassionate, true to life—are about people navigating the trickiest of landscapes: a world full of other people. Each of these characters wants to know, in her or his own way, given the crazy ups and downs and ins and outs of relationships, is it better to go it alone, or is it better to try to carve out a place for yourself, whatever it takes?
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