Lester Goran is one of the most prolific short-story writers of contemporary American literature. The author of noteworthy mythopoeic fiction, Goran fictively re-creates Oakland, a working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the same way that William Faulkner based his Yoknapatawpha County on Lafayette County in Mississippi, or John Cheever based his Bullet Park or Shady Hill on the suburban towns of Westchester County in New York State. Though Faulkner and Cheever gave new names to their geographical locations, Goran uses the real names of streets, buildings, schools, universities, and churches in Oakland. Within that attenuated world, his stories of fictional residents treat such universal themes as the return of the hero from war, the portrait of the artist, the fall from innocence into experience, the painful plight of the marginalized, sexual desperation and celebration, alcoholism, the agony of the inarticulate, and the necessity of fiction as redemption from...