Floating World: Tales of Unrequited Love in ’90s New York

by Frank Pike

Four seriocomic tales of New Yorkers in the arts, gay and straight, frustrated in the pursuit of love and their precarious careers, set in that almost forgotten world before the deluge of smart phones and social media changed forever how we navigate relationships and work.

99 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 23, 2023

About the author

Frank Pike has written books and articles on theater and playwriting. His plays, including The Harry Plays and Smaller Heartaches (which won the Twin Cities Kudos Award for Best New Play) have been produced across the country, including New York, Boston, San Diego and Minneapolis. He has taught playwriting at Middlebury College, the University of Minnesota, The Playwrights' Center and The Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. His short stories have been published in literary magazines such as Boulevard. He has received creative writing grants from the Mellon Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Bush Foundation and McKnight Foundation.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The four stories in this collection by Frank Pike are exquisite—lyrical but strong, fine jewels but not delicate, certainly not breakable, each with its own big emotional punch. I remember The Two Waynes when it was first published; I have that issue of Boulevard Magazine on the bookshelf in my study. Reading it again now is an experience deeply etched with nostalgia. Assumption was also published in Boulevard—a beauty I hadn’t read before. The other two are gorgeous as well; I hardly breathed from beginning to end. The careful accrual of Pike’s images tricks you into reading for the beauty of the words--like Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” or Hopkins “The Windhover” (I had to look them up to remember why those English major delights were occurring to me reading Pike’s stories)--and then realizing that the stories really are "seeing into the life of things". And deeply. In other words, they are not about remembered pleasure, not about chagrin, but about deep loss and sadness. So glad the stories are together now in this readable, shareable form!