LARRY GROSS -- SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED

It's a city of loss, loneliness and late-night desperation that CityBeat staffer Larry Gross conjures in his first book, Signed, Sealed and Delivered. His 15 swift, drifting tales occur in a Cincinnati of deserted bars, midnight bus rides and sodium vapor streetscapes akin to Edward Hopper paintings. His people are hookers, has-beens and holdouts from life's momentum -- lonely souls who pass in the night, sometimes touching, sometimes only reaching out -- along with a series of "I" narrators: sons, fathers and husbands who might have different names and different longings but add up like different weeks in the same life. His prose flows, a placid surface masking inner turbidity. Versions of some of the pieces originally appeared in CityBeat and elsewhere. A father's birthday gift to his son is his requested absence from the son's party. Another son can't recall a single conversation with a father who labored dawn to dusk until he retired, then talked of nothing but weather and cars and superficialities. A boy's mother must be forced to put candles on his birthday cakes; they measure time's passage after all. A man either does or doesn't send anonymous letters to his wife with photos of himself entangled with an old girlfriend. Couples wrangle. Marriages curdle and collapse in the face of boredom, neglect and diverging priorities. Still, Gross finds room for dignity in the desperate, disgusting things his people do to themselves and to each other as they drift away. They remind me of a line in a Charles Lamb poem that I just happened to encounter at the same time: "All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." (Tom McElfresh) Grade: B

LARRY GROSS -- SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED (iUNIVERSE)