Guernica Editions

In Kissing a Tree Surgeon, worlds traverse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in New Jersey; Southern women get kidnapped by North Koreans; a Dutch girl solicits money on OKCupid; a young woman meets Golda Meir on an Upper East Side bus in New York City, and other deliriously satirical moments occur. Here are more highlights: a character believes he's the biological son of Frank Sinatra; Zionist-Hasidic lesbians protest anti-Semitism at a women's Catholic college; a stalking moviegoer takes her dead grandmother to a Bertolucci film; a daughter meets her father's mistress at his grave; an employee is banned from calling her boss in the office; an adult woman visits the radio store in Lakewood, New Jersey, of the boy who didn't invite her to his bar mitzvah.

My father had an unorthodox way of eating apples. He'd crunch with excessive force, so you could hear every piece of apple dispensed in his mouth. His chomping disrupted any sense of decorum at our table, for he believed more in anarchism and nonconformity than in providing us with good dinner etiquette.