Missing in Action: 12 Stories

by Ed Ifkovic

Novelist Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road) once wrote in a celebratory letter to the “Your strength as a writer is creating a deceptively quiet chronicle of harsh events.” This collection of twelve disparate short stories reinforces Yates’ succinct observation, a collection of published and unpublished fiction that explores a wide range of human experience captured through Ifkovic’s vision.In such stories as "Miss Connecticut” and “Love,” the author probes the life of small-town America and the scandal that lies beneath the serene surface. Others, like “Hedges,” ”Gaetano,” and “Neighbors,” are set against a backdrop of dying New England cities in which struggling families grapple with change they cannot understand. Yet others present fanciful plays on celebrity, as in ”Dyanna Ross” and ”Superstar,” characters who live in the shadows of those whose names are up in lights. “Cleopatra" and “Missing in Action" move the reader back to the years following the long and painful Vietnam War—and its devastating legacy. In “Emilie” a troubled woman unearths an unknown letter from Emily Dickinson and it redefines her life. In ”Observance" a lost man finds himself grappling with ghosts from his past that continue to haunt him. Finally, “The Marriage Room” explores the intricacies of unconventional lives.Ifkovic chronicles lives at the moment they look into shadowy mirrors—or find themselves on the edge of discovery. Together these stories reflect Yates’ added the author’s story lines “bring character to life on the page.”

282 pages, Paperback

Published February 25, 2015

About the author

AKA Edward Ifkovic

Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades, and now, retired, devotes himself to writing fiction. His short stories and essays have appeared in such diverse periodicals as the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and the Journal of Popular Culture. He’s published fiction with small presses, including a novel based on the life of Victorian poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls his boyhood discovery of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world. When he was fourteen, bored on a lazy summer afternoon, his mother handed him a copy of Edna Ferber’s Cimarron—for him, a riveting Western about the settling of Oklahoma and the discovery of oil—and he stayed up until three in the morning, until, bleary-eyed, he finished the novel.