The characters in John M. Daniel's new collection of fiction walk in and out of each other's stories, giving the book a friendly continuity. The book is also held together by the author's obvious enjoyment of old-fashioned popular song; most of the stories are named after American standards, and one of the recurring characters is a piano player named Casey, who views the world as his own piano bar.

Also common to the stories in Generous Helpings is the theme of California disasters. These stories, as different as they are from one another, contain such memorable events as the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Painted Cave fire, the Rodney King riots, and the devastating El Niño storms of 1983.

But the most important unifying theme of this book is suggested by the title: that people everywhere survive their problems and make progress only by helping one another. Generous Helpings is a slender volume of long short stories, and a big-hearted book.

About the author:
John M. Daniel spent his young adulthood wandering the state of California, working as a bookseller, innkeeper, editor, and muscian. When the odd jobs got old, he settled on the Central Coast, where for the past twenty years he has earned a living as a small-press publisher (Daniel & Daniel), freelance editor, ghostwriter, and writing teacher. Writing under his own name and dozens of pseudonyms, he has published over a hundred short stories, as well as three mystery novels and several books of nonfiction.

About the publisher
Shoreline Press is the publishing arm of Pacific Books, a distributor specializing in books about the nature and history of Coastal California. Generous Helpings is Shoreline's first venture into the realm of fiction. You can contact Shoreline Press by phone at (805) 687-8340, or by mail at P.O. Box 3562, Santa Barbara, CA 93130