Coming Up Short

This is a multifaceted treat: a sparkling collection of T.V. LoCicero's best short fiction and non-fiction penned over the past five decades—14 stories, memoirs, essays and occasional pieces that are by turns brilliant, hilarious, moving and insightful. Together they offer a wonderful array of unlikely but vividly realized characters:
--A colorful black caddie who plays one of the strangest rounds in the history of golf.
--The mild, unassuming fellow often dubbed the greatest crime writer of our time.
--A Hall of Fame athlete whose decades of triumph ended in sudden death on a Manhattan street.
--A comfortable suburban matron who pays a charitable call on the squalid inner-city room of her long-time maid.
--The Little League dad whose compulsive flirtation with Lady Luck may cost him his thumbs, fingernails or the soul of his son.
--An earnest young reporter who thinks the witty, gorgeous gal he just met is too good to be true…until she claims to adore him, and then he's got one small problem.
--A meddling spinster so perversely intent on helping her eccentric old housemate that nothing good can ever come of it.
--The author himself back in the day, divorced, broke, living in a refashioned garage and looking for a job that pays.