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Unveils the rich tapestry of adventure and purpose just below the surface of our ordinary lives.

• A young woman tries to teach her nephew the beauty and joy of nature while he wreaks havoc in the woods.
• An aging war veteran struggles to reveal to a neighbor boy the secret of his war wounds.
• The estranged sons of an immigrant reunite at his death to justify their own lives.
• A woman expecting her first child fears what she sees from the others in Lamaze class. And many other stories.

Morelli also satirizes reality talk shows, rock and roll idolatry and a man who uses technology to give his son a sex talk. Mark Morelli states: "I didn't know it at the time, but I was writing about a culture being pushed and pulled in the confluence of two worlds: A simple, traditional past that exploded into world war. And a mass media society two seconds away from exploding into global hyperspeed. It was a transformational moment. Some say the world got better. Others say worse. I didn't know then. I don't know now. All I wanted to do was use my imagination to shape what I saw and try to make some sense of it."      

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The settings are vivid, conflicts concisely defined, and the themes are eternal: love, death, and the binding power of Italian cooking.

“A young girl with her BB gun; a goopy-eyed boy in a dank basement; a muddy, drunk man hiding behind his father’s freshly dug grave: these are just a few of the characters you’ll meet—and become haunted by—in Mark Morelli’s Tales of Zoalmont and the Melanchology Fringe. Arranged in the order in which they were written, between 1982 and 1993, these stories reveal much more than a young man earning chops as a fiction writer. The settings are vivid, conflicts concisely defined, and the themes are eternal: love, death, and the binding power of Italian cooking. Morelli also exhibits a finely tuned ear for dialogue—the stilted stammer of a father delivering “The Talk” to his son; the loaded Morse code of long-married couples; and the plaintive patter of whiskey drinkers. You will come to know, intimately, the keenly drawn denizens of Zoalmont, and you will carry them with you for a long, long time.”

Kimberly Willardson
Editor, The Vincent Brothers Review
www.vincentbrothersreview.org

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Each short essay is just the beginning of a conversation that you can continue with your students, your friends...and yourself.

Mark Morelli wrote these stories during -- and about -- the end of an era in American culture. The World War II generation was retiring just as the rise the digital age began. These are stories of faith, family, heritage and community, of a Norman Rockwell world colliding with a 24/7 media age...​

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Other books by Mark Morelli

Also available in print & Kindle formats on Amazon sites in the UK, continental Europe & around the world,
and on Barnes  & Noble, Books-A-Million, AbeBooks, Adlibris, Booktopia and other stores.