Nine short stories about American life, unrequited love, familial distrust, and unfair parental control, and a novella where cultures clash and humans survive with caring and selflessness overcoming the default of violence and destruction. Each story rich with unique characters proving they have the will to survive life's most difficult obstacles, and discover their own capabilities to affect their own destinies.

Facing Grace with Gloria and Other Stories explores mysteries of human desires and the unique ways each of us struggles to fulfill our meaning for existence. Each story is unique in time and setting, every character balancing strengths and weaknesses to succeed, discovering something new about themselves and the paradoxes of their worlds. This collection of short stories includes: The Gift The Stonecutter Facing Grace with Gloria Grace Homunculus Reddog Captain Withers's Wife The Thirteen Nudes of Ernest Goings Crossing Over The Activist The Perennial Student The Curse of a Lonely Heart Suchin's Escape

Mike Boudreaux, as a trauma surgeon Chief of Service, must discipline an impaired surgeon performing unnecessary and dangerous surgery for the obese. He is Boudreaux's former teacher and mentor, and Boudreaux falls in love with his young, beautiful, New-Orleans-socially-prominent wife. Boudreaux cannot hide the adulterous affair that erodes his career authority and reputation. Family and society reject the woman he loves unconditionally; when she moves in with Boudreaux, her rebellious daughter disappears. As Boudreaux tries to retrieve and convince the daughter to support her mother, the jealous husband's surgical career declines; a young patient dies; the public is outraged. The crazed husband blames his wife and Boudreaux for his decline and threatens violent revenge. The couple plans marriage and strains to regain pride and confidence amidst the hostility of accusatory taunts of friends, family and society.

Darwin Hastings is seventeen and his dying aunt sends him from Pittsburgh to New York to a new guardian, a famous wealthy football player. He is excited and afraid; he wants to recapture the love he knew with his parents before they died and become a doctor like his father. But in his new home of celebrities, crooks, untrustworthiness, and excessively wealthy deviants, lust and want thwart his search for selfless caring love, and in his quest to become a doctor, he discovers the altruism of health care and scientific discovery riddled with profit motivation and deficient moral standards. A finalist in the 2012 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Sister Carrie is a novella about a sister who must mother her younger sister when their parents die. The younger sister falls in love with a foreigner with a dark, undisclosed past. Cultures clash and the sisters lose caring and selflessness in a web of violence and destruction. A story rich with unique characters proving they have will to survive life's most difficult obstacles, and discover inner resources to affect their own destinies.