Married but Looking
by Daniel S. Libman
Pushchart Prize-winner Libman's debut collection establishes him as
a talented and original new voice in contemporary fiction. Many stories
provide a glimpse into the minds of characters contemplating adultery.
In the title story, a married couple travels to Paris where the wife
proceeds to send romantic Facebook messages to a former boyfriend, while
the husband patronizes a sex club, only to become too racked with guilt
to act on his desires. In "Best Man," the protagonist, Boze,
attends an out of state wedding without his wife and lusts after another
woman. Libman manages to make Boze sympathetic, despite his lechery.
In "In the Belly of the Cat," the elderly main character, Mr.
Christopher, calls up a prostitute with the plan to cook a fancy meal
with recipes he found in the newspaper's food section. However, she only
has an hour before her pimp will interrupt them, so Mr. Christopher must
rush through the evening. With these skillful examinations of the human
condition, Libman will surely have a long career.
— Publishers Weekly, reviewed on: 10/24/2011
Daniel Libman writes like no one else: quick, funny, touching, serious,
sometimes surreal, with a distinctive colloquial voice, slightly odd
characters, spot-on dialog and off-beat original situations.
— Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and What is All This
Dan Libman is equally dexterous rendering a fictional world in realism
or in fabulism, and likewise adroit — to a reader’s satisfying astonishment
— in blurring the two seamlessly together, with the understated ironic
perspective of a Coen Brothers film.
— Cris Mazza, author of Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?
From the book jacket:
Unabashedly funny — at turns dirty, revolting, tender and sarcastic —
Daniel S. Libman’s stories bring us a new style that is part inner
dialogue, part comic monologue — Grace Paley meets Charles Bukowski.
Married But Looking by Daniel S. Libman
Paper. 222 pages $16.95
ISBN 978-1-60489-079-2
Published by Livingston
Press