These ten stories take the reader a small step over the millennial border back t the twentieth century, but a giant leap into a world in which it was still possible to strategically lose a form in a filing cabinet, find inspiration browsing in a used bookstore, ponder a riddle in a handwritten letter, and even count on a nude photo to permanently disappear – a world of print instead of pixels, pages instead of screens, and privacy instead of publicity.
The characters that populate thsese stories are ordinary, with modest if any social capital, and often hapless or cornered. Nonetheless, they forge ahead, drawing on their resources of observation, sentiment, imagination, memory, and a fair amount of magical thinking when all else fails.