Kissing in Manhattan

David Shickler's much anticipated work of fiction, Kissing in Manhattan, casts a knowing eye on a handful of lonely, love-starved New Yorkers, many of whom are inhabitants of the Preemption, a legendary Gothic apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The surprising ways that the lives of these apartment dwellers intersect, building to an emotional climax in the final piece. In "Jacob's Bath," an older couple's intimate marital ritual is betrayed by the press. An enigmatic young man binds up his dates in the title piece; and a man mysteriously comes into the possession of a pair of opal earrings in "The Opals." In "The Smoker," a story will be familiar to readers of The New Yorker, a private-school teacher is lured to the home of one of his prize pupils for an evening he won't soon forget. David Schickler's Manhattan is dark and decadent, a place where love and pathos mingle. His stories and characters are always humorous, sexy, and a bit off-center, but often heartbreaking, too. This forceful debut is clearly the mark of a bold new talent in fiction.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Romance. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.