Local Author Abby Mendelson on his new collection of short stories. All proceeds donated to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
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Purchase Reunion: Americans in Exile now
From the award-winning author of Paradise Boys, Scotch and Oranges, Ghost Dancer, End of the Road, and The Oakland Quartet comes Reunion, a striking new collection of 16 stories. Subtitled Americans in Exile, Reunion chronicles the lives of Americans torn from their places and their pasts. Set in a wide variety of locales – England to Hawaii, Venice to Vietnam, Park Slope to Prague, Block Island to Hoonah, Alaska – the stories go where Americans find themselves searching for connection, coping with aging and loss. Military men and missing persons, foreign service officers and fashion models, friends and lovers, grief groups and high-school reunions, Reunion presents a stunning series of portraits of characters and concerns, living and dying, present and past. People wrestling with the concerns of age and of our age. People living on edges, seeking to return, yearning for reunion.
Abby Mendelson is the author of three novels, Paradise Boys, Scotch and Oranges, and The Oakland Quartet, and two story collections, Ghost Dancer and End of the Road. He also wrote The Pittsburgh Steelers Official History, in a fourth edition; The Pittsburgh Steelers: Yesterday and Today; The Steelers Experience; Arena: Remembering the Igloo; Pittsburgh: A Place in Time, about Pittsburgh neighborhoods, in a second edition; Pittsburgh Prays: Thirty-Six Houses of Worship; Voices from the Hill: A Celebration of Hill House; Reckoning with Rainbows: The History of The Pressley Ridge Schools; and A Century of Caring: The History of Holy Family Institute. For Pittsburgh Born, Pittsburgh Bred, the official 250th Pittsburgh anniversary book, he contributed more than 200 profiles of notable Pittsburghers. As an editor, he has handled a variety of complex projects, including various histories and biographies, Countdown to Renaissance II, the first study of the 1970s Pittsburgh urban revitalization, and Wilderness Within, Wilderness Without, about the lives of troubled teens in a treatment center. Having written countless newspaper and magazine articles on a wide variety of subjects, as part of a 50-year career, he currently teaches literature and writing at Chatham University, Point Park University, and the University of Pittsburgh Osher Program. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh.