Peter Cameron

As the curtain falls on the vibrant, gritty New York of the 1980s, just-divorced David and Loren Parish watch their  lives  come apart-but not before one last year of self-absorbed fun. Even with their daughter Kate mistakenly kidnapped, an absurd murder  in a SoHo gallery, and friends suffering from the full spectrum of yuppie maladies, David and Loren are determined to  make some sense of their messy and complicated lives.  Loren  moves in...

Here characters act on lies they spin to protect themselves,  or to protect others. In "What Do People Do All Day?", a child gamely stalls a father's confession of adultery. The heroine of "Fast Forward" tells her dying mother that she's engaged-a lie designed to give the old woman a final few days of happiness. And in "Memorial Day," a teenage boy struggles to adjust to his mother's new husband, a stepfather only thirteen years his senior.

After winning a grant, Omar Razaghi travels to the estate of the late Uruguayan author Jules Gund in order to convince his three executors to let him write an authorized biography.

"Precocious yet vulnerable teenager James ... has a deep appreciation for the world, but no idea how to live in it. Finding no help from his divorced parents ..., nor his twenty-year-old memoir-writing sister ..., James decides to reject the assumptions that govern the adult world, starting with his potential college career. Grappling with his future, his sexuality, and his screwed up family, James embarks on a search for wisdom through nontraditional...