FITHIAN PRESS The Stories Behind the Masks "Like a male Scheherazade, Isaacs offers irresistable story hooks to women, who act like soft (and sometimes sharp) pillows, amorous auditors to his nightly ruminations. --Foreword Magazine, January 1999 The interconnected stories that make up The Miller Masks--A Novel in Stories by Neil D. Isaacs are fragments of the personality of its hero, Jesse Miller, and each reveals a mask this character wears. Jesse Miller is a freelance writer, a bicoastal Jewish academic, a husband, an ex-husband, a father, a son, a lover, a talker and teller of tales, a college kid, a college teacher, a tennis player, a man on the make, a man on the come, a man on the job, a man on the ropes and a man on the mend. These stories span half a century of Jesse's life, focusing on epiphanies at every stage: the child caught dancing naked in his room by his older brother, the college kid urinating on a girls' dorm lawn to the applause of its denizens, the onset of crabs between affairs, the casting of parental ashes into the sea which brings a gift of love to the son. Jesse doesn't wear all his masks at the same time, nor do all the aspects of this complicated character appear in every story. But in a sense he carries the whole package through life, so that, for example, his failed marriage to Rachel haunts most of his subsequent affairs. And affairs are the major leitmotif of this novel, along with a love of sports, a delight in games, and a fascination with storytelling itself. The stories in The Miller Masks are told with a sassy style that echoes Woody Allen and Neil Simon. We're also reminded of these writers by Jesse Miller: here is a likable hero we can laugh with and at; a hero who reminds us of our foibles and our masks. Jesse Miller is a character with whom we can identify, but from a safe distance created by fiction and laughter.   About the author. Neil D. Isaacs is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He also practices as a family therapist in Colesville, Maryland. His books include Batboys and the World of Baseball (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1995), All the Moves: A History of College Basketball (Lippincott, 1975, updated for Harper & Row, 1984), Checking Back: A History of N.H.L. Hockey (Norton, 1977), Jock Culture, U.S.A. (Norton, 1978). His scholarly publications include books on Old English poetry, Tolkein, Grace Paley, and Eudora Welty. His first novel was The Great Molinas (WID Publishing Group and the Sport Literature Association, 1992). His essays, stories, and poems have appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Baltimore Sun, and in journals including Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and New England Review. The Miller Masks A Novel in Stories Neil Isaacs ISBN 1-56474-308-X 208 pages, paperback, $12.95 For ordering information, click here or phone (800) 662-8351 or order this book now!