Some of the Old Good Feelings and Other Stories

To mark his eightieth year, notable fiction writer, essayist and poet Richard Teleky has collected fourteen of his short stories – selected and new – in Some of the Old Good Feelings and Other Stories. With rich insight and subtle precision, he enters and inhabits unexpected moments in the lives of gay and bisexual men over nearly a century of shifting attitudes and conventions. His characters range from restless children, impulsive teenagers, settled couples, middle-aged lovers, and elderly solitudes, to even a life-size plaster statue of St. Roch, patron of bachelors and plague victims. Their personal dilemmas inevitably meet the world beyond the self, and include the end of the Big Band era, memories of the Black Plague, the theft of an engraving by Albrecht Dü rer, a father’ s curious souvenir of the Second World War, a Covid clash between friends, and, finally, nuclear devastation. Told in the clear, intense prose that novelist Claire Messud has praised as “ direct and sensuous,” these are compassionately unsentimental stories to remember and return to.