"The Human Contract" Brings Back What Stories Should Be.A novelist committed to the Romantic vision, Walter Donway puts first elements such as plot, the clash of values among characters, focused and revealing dialogue, and an evocative but fast-paced style. In his short stories, he handles with equal ease thrillers. Fantasies and science fiction. The John O'Hara-type glimpse into how we live. And powerful erotic stories that go well beyond mere sex encounters.All of it reaches out to snag life as it passes us in full flight. Even so, he can slow down to use the poet's consummate skill with language to let us see and feel things as they happen. It all makes for a series of great adventures in short fiction, the ideal reading to enter another world for an hour or two and return appreciating our own lives.In his introduction to "The Human Contract," Walter Donway writes: "Romanticism never lost its popularity with the public, but, with the rise of "naturalism" (generically "realism") in the mid-Nineteenth Century, fiction turned for its subjects to society, "real life," "real people," and the philosophical premise of Emile Zola and others that man's fate is determined by social forces, economic forces, historical forces. His apparent freedom is an illusion."From then on, fiction increasingly was about some "slice of life," some portrayal of "how we live now," and, over several decades, "serious" fiction in the mass magazines began to lose its audience. Sometime in the late 1950s, I estimate, reference to the "New Yorker story"-plotless, sociological, and gritty with "realism"-became shorthand for literary fiction that had lost its readers."Stories in this book: The Human ContractThe Denier#MeToo! Between My Boobs, Professor!Once A RacistThe AlchemistAt the New Aloha Spa, Wally Wants One Not for SaleA Very John O'Hara EndingWhat She'll Never BeExactly What Lena Macherzynski WantedRemember to ScreamNothing but A GunThe Virgin and the UnicornLove Without SentimentA Woman of Mass DestructionEvery one is different, every one is an original, every one is worth reading for its own sake.
