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Joseph Cowley
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Writers Club Press
ISBN-10: 0595218350
Type: Fiction
Pages: 242
Copyright: 2002
The Night Billy Was Born and Other Love Stories is a collection, arranged chronologically, about love at all ages, from teenage to nonage.
THE NIGHT BILLY WAS BORN AND OTHER LOVE STORIES is about love sat all ages: the passionate affair of two teenagers; the delicate relationships between a brother and sister, their cousin, and their adoptive aunt and her dead husband; the obsession of a young man in his early twenties for an older woman, and her love for an older man; the love of a husband and his pregnant wife under straitened circumstances; and extra-marital affair between a divorced, unemployed writer and a beatiful woman he meets in Alcoholics Anonymous; the unexpected love of a married woman in her fifties for another woman; the sentimental journey of an old man whose wife has recently died to find the love he left behind in war-torn England after World War II; and the loneliness of a woman nearing ninety who has no one, not even her husband, who is non compos mentis, to share her grief with over the death of her son.
Excerpt
From "Once More With Feeling"
It was, he knew, a foolish mission, one that might be credited to old age--if he hadn't always been somewhat foolish, at least where women were concerned. Myra, of course, had known of his predilection, but had kept that secret for him, hidden even from the children, through their forty-two years of married life, out of consideration for, he supposed, that terrible softness he saw as a weakness, his incurable romanticism.
It had always been so. Maybe it was because he had never grown up, despite the years. For inside he felt young, felt that he was what he was when he was young, still in love, with life as well as Myra, dreaming still of Truth and Beauty, seeking still that Holy Grail which was God and human perfection, as if time were forever and dreams had no end, never seeing until now "the black fin on the blank sea," as Virginia Woolf, who was one day to walk into that blank sea, called it in one of her diaries.
Always the poet, he was nevertheless realist enough, even when young, to be aware of the need to earn a living, and, in love with words, decided that, after the creation of Truth and Beauty, there was no higher calling than helping others experience them, or, if they could not, at least help them fall in love with words so that....
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