In this captivating novella, Judy Pomeranz explores the infinite variety of worlds within worlds that make up Manhattan and reveals how love, in its many guises and permutations, is the single most powerful motivating force within entirely disparate souls. A desperate, adulterous love between a cabaret singer and a physician is just as compelling as a grandmother’s devotion to the memory of her late grandson and a bartender’s to the memory of his late wife. One brother’s love for another wreaks just as much havoc as a wealthy, lonely man’s feelings for a young fellow he is afraid to adore. Seen through multiple points of view in interlocking stories, Manhattan and its inhabitants come vividly to life. Love is elusive, but loneliness and loss are tempered by moments of grace. Faith is sometimes impossible to hold onto, but its absence clears the way for reflection and self-examination. Death slams some doors shut, but opens others a crack. Right and wrong become relative, or meaningless. Through the eyes of one small, quirky coterie of New Yorkers, the human condition unfolds before our eyes. This is the first in a trio of novellas by Pomeranz set in Manhattan’s art world. An earlier version of this book, called On the Far Edge of Love: New York Stories, appeared as a serial in élan magazine. Judy Pomeranz is a freelance writer of art reviews, articles, short stories, novellas and essays which have been published in a wide variety of publications, as noted below, and an instructor of fiction writing. She is also a lecturer on art history topics, a study leader on art travel tours, and an art advisor who assists clients in finding and procuring works of art and in forming collections. She taught classes on writing fiction and criticism in Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies in Washington, DC, from 2003 to 2007 and taught writing courses for the Smithsonian Associates Program and the Trinity College Elderhostel Program. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Crescent Review, Santa Barbara Review, Potomac Review, Fodderwing, Elan, and Mass Ave Review, and in the short story anthologies Extreme Gravity, Great Writers, Great Stories, Chesapeake Crimes, and Chesapeake Crimes II.