The Game Café: Stories of New York City in Covid Time

by Eleanor Lerman

The nine stories in The Game Café focus on people who live in New York City—or are traveling there—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. These men and women include a security guard; a mother with a far-away daughter; a ham radio operator; two strangers playing a board game in a café; a woman driving from Los Angeles to Manhattan who makes a stop at a famous corner in Winslow, Arizona; an unemployed airport worker who has an unexpected reconciliation with his brother; and others. While the stories are primarily set in New York, they are also meant to explore how living in modern-day urban environments in the U.S. unalterably shapes the fate of people going through difficult times.

160 pages, Paperback

Published December 20, 2022

About the author

Eleanor Lerman is a writer who lives in New York. Her first book of poetry, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), published when she was twenty-one, was nominated for a National Book Award. She has since published four other award-winning collections of poetry—Come the Sweet By and By (University of Massachusetts Press, 1975); The Mystery of Meteors (Sarabande Books, 2001); Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande Books, 2005); and The Sensual World Re-Emerges (Sarabande Books, 2010), along with The Blonde on the Train (Mayapple Press, 2009) a collection of short stories. She was awarded the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Nation magazine for the year's most outstanding book of poetry for Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds and received a 2007 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first novel, Janet Planet, based on the life of Carlos Castaneda, was published by Mayapple Press in 2011. Her latest collection of poetry, Strange Life,was published by Mayapple in 2015. Since then, her novel, Radiomen (The Permanent Press, 2016) was awarded the John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her next novel, The Stargazer's Embassy, was released in July 2017. Her most recent novel, Satellite Street, will be released in October 2019.

Reviews

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quotable:

She entered the [book]store ad then spent longer than she'd planned to wandering the narrow aisles, which were crowded with shelves of books, bins full of books. Eden selected half-a-dozen used paperbacks, put them down on the counter, and then went back to pick out a few more. What she had in mind was to go home and put them on her nightstand. She fully intended to read them through, one by one, but she knew that just the sight of them would confort her every time she walked into her bedroom. And what would be comforting, too, was the idea that she would not be alone with these books: all over the city there would be women in bedrooms, in living rooms, on subway trains and buses and at their kitchen tables, reading, reading, reading their way through all the history ever recorded, all the myths ever created, all the stories ever written down.
And what would they be doing, really? They'd be trying to understand things, even if the only way they could rely on was toturn the pages of a story that they held in their hands.

[Lacey Garcia (cozybooknook) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Game Cafe is a book of short stories about how the pandemic affected residents in New York City. These are every day people and the stories are about how they coped. There are no major surprise or tragic type stories and I think it’s why I loved it so much.

It’s all so relatable. We all went through the pandemic and we all had our own experience, so we understand each and every one of these characters.

Some of them switched to working from home. Some had to switch jobs entirely. Some went on unemployment. Some gathered safely with friends from their building. Others were alone.

It’s early days and all of them are seeing their city in a way they have never seen it before. Still. Slow. Empty. They also have no idea what is going to happen. Will things ever be the same?

It’s an interesting read to see through the eyes of others as the pandemic was just beginning.

[Littlenel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book of short stories set in New York during the pandemic. Some of them are almost poetic, the prose is very engaging and I could imagine myself in each of the locations mentioned.