1963. Hattertown, Connecticut. Leo " Half" Napoli mourns his dead hat factory worker father while daydreaming of being the first man on the moon and thereby " partaking of something of the infinite." Meanwhile, he and his fellow Back Shop Boys (their fathers all worked in the dangerous, mercury-fume-laden back shops of hat factories) seek to learn the identity of the mysterious Man in Blue, who wanders the town collecting odd items in his rucksack. Elected to spy on him, Half and the mysterious man form a secret friendship in the course of which Half learns not only what " Jack Thomas" has been collecting in his rucksack, and why, but the extraordinary circumstances that led to his fugitive existence — an odyssey extending from pre-WWII Bohemia to a German POW Camp in Illinois, and beyond.

In the Fall of 1970, at the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford wearing Frye boots, with long blond hair, and a passion for his students that was as intense as it was rebellious. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin competing for the attention and affection of his parents. He had a burning need to feel special.The new teacher supplied that need. Together they spent hours in the teacher's carriage house, discussing books, playing chess, drinking tea, and wrestling. They were inseparable, until the teacher “resigned" from his job and left. Over the next ten years Peter and the teacher corresponded copiously and met occasionally, their last meeting ending in disaster. Only after the teacher died did Peter learn that he'd done all he could to evade his past, identifying himself first as an orphaned Rhodes Scholar, and later as a Native American.As for Peter's father, the genius...

The stories in Drowning Lessons engage water as both a vital and a potentially hazardous presence in our lives. "You can touch water," says Peter Selgin, "you can taste it and feel its temperature, you can even hold it in your hands. Still it remains elusive, ill-defined, shaped only by what surrounds or contains it." With empathy and wit Selgin introduces us to characters navigating the choppy waters of human relationships. In "Swimming" an avid swimmer fights the stasis in his marriage by prodding his out-of-shape but contented wife to take up the sport--with near-disastrous results. A pond is the setting of "The Wolf House," which tells of the reunion and dissolution of a group of high school friends brought together for a funeral. "The Sinking Ship Man" chronicles a day in the life of an African American caretaker in charge of the only remaining survivor of the Titanic disaster. In "El Malecón" a toothless old Dominican tries to recapture his lost dignity by "borrowing" a shiny Cadillac convertible and aiming it down the coastal highway toward his childhood village. In "The Sea Cure" two travelers in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula confront death in the form of a mysterious woman living in an abandoned beachfront apartment complex.In all thirteen tales in Drowning Lessons, Selgin exhibits a keen eye for the forces that push people toward--and sometimes beyond--their very human limits, forces as intrinsic, elemental, and elusive as the liquid that makes up two-thirds of their bodies. These stories remind us that of all bodies of water, none is deeper or more dangerous than our own.

A tour de force, Life Goes to the Movies is the love story of two straight men: a dark devil of a Vietnam vet-turned-filmmaker, and the naive Italian American innocent who follows him to the edge of madness and beyond. Funny, engaging, and entertaining, this is just a great story told well.Peter Selgin's short story collection Drowning Lessons won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He's also published book-length nonfiction and an award-winning children's book. He's the fiction editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food."Wonderfully innovative and elegantly crafted, Life Goes to the Movies brims with exuberance and wit.  Both a celebrationand something of an elegy for the golden age of Hollywood, this novel reeled me in with its propulsive energy and won me over before I had finished chaper one."-- Frederick Reiken, author of The Lost Legends of New Jersey"Life Goes to the Movies is the...