Peter LaSalle

A collection of short stories on very different lives and how they find peace at the end of each day, regardless of how chaotic their day to day lives are.
Everyone is looking for something to comfort them, to make them relax and and take a step back from their chaotic life and what might come next. Whether its a boy caught up in a gang of orphans who murder men and kidnap orphan girls, or a professor battling a horrible illness, they, like us, are all looking for comfort and solace at the end of each and every day. Some sign of normalcy and predictable to comfort and lull them to sleep before they start thinking about what might be thrown at them tomorrow. People who live their lives from one day to the next, not sure if they will see tomorrow, not sure if they want to see tomorrow. They put on this mask at the end of their day, a mask of familiarity and hope, something to make them forget about their woahs for just a few minutes.
The characters are lively and realistic, outlandish, but relatable. they are all unique and so completely different from one another, each of their stories are so different from one another, and yet, at the end of the day, they are all looking for the same things before they drop off into sleep.… (meer)

Time is a contemporary problem. Peter LaSalle suspends it in his short stories, called "fictions," collected in the "Sleeping Mask" (New York 2017) by the Bellevue Literary Press. What better place to suspend time, bringing the past forward and placing the present behind it, than in a dream behind a sleeping mask?

LaSalle's fictions may suspend time but not belief. The fictions are set in familiar places and the characters appear real, stark in their human conditions. Love that becomes sad when it brings together the young and old. Rebellion when boys war like men and girls make it moral, mortal and personal. Dreams of Edgar Allan Poe reading of his posthumous fame when he no doubt toiled in debt. Bud the painter, who had not followed a normal course to success, which spooked him and his drinking buddies to eternity.

The protagonists of some fictions have no reference bias – not in the story but of the story. An illness takes a liking to windows; drawing inspiration from Wallace Stevens' poetry. A jet flight with nothing to do but let its passengers transgress to its end. The hands of fascism, which strangle civil disobedience. Mirrors, which I agree with LaSalle – never to be taken for granted.

I often read the last entry of short story collections first and save the first for last. But I first took in LaSalle's fictions in serial order because the Bellevue press promises in each of its books a transformative read that resound in memory. LaSalle's fictions did not disappoint me. I will randomly take them up again.… (meer)