Small Bites - by Don Tassone (Paperback)

About the Book

In Small Bites, Don Tassone offers readers bits of contemporary life, mostly gentle, mostly optimistic, often instructive. Stories range from flash-fiction size "Appetizers" and "Desserts" to twenty-page "Entrees," studies of how relationships develop, how serendipity works, how decisions are made and unmade.

Book Synopsis

In Small Bites, Don Tassone offers readers bits of contemporary life, mostly gentle, mostly optimistic, often instructive. Stories range from flash-fiction size half-pagers to twenty-page studies of how relationships develop, how decisions are made and unmade, how persuasion and collaboration work.

The collection is divided into fourteen tiny Appetizers, twelve substantial Entrees, and fourteen small but intense Desserts. Appetizers like "Friends" and "Run" are quick and easy to consume; they're secular parables, meant to produce a small, "got it!" sense of surprise as readers fill in what's implied but not directly stated. Entrees range more widely, sometimes questioning current forms of connectivity, sometimes underscoring a sense that humans need to trust and to engage with one another. "The Discord in Our Souls," for example, leaves readers puzzling over which of several bad options is least bad. "Beauty Mark" traces a model's reaction to the accident which defaces her. "Everything Is Real" includes a ghost. Most stories in the final set, the Desserts, focus on beginnings and endings--on little acts of courage, sweet though painful memories, manageable ironies.

In Small Bites, Don Tassone combines insights gained during a successful thirty-year career in corporate public relations with those which come from growing up in a middle class American family, becoming a parent, watching people grow. He's the author of the novel, Drive, and another collection of stories titled Get Back. He currently teaches courses at Xavier University, writes, and enjoys cooking up stories like these.

Review Quotes

Small Bites offers a menu of short stories that produce a tug-o-war for readers: read faster because the stories are so appealing--or slow down because you don't want the book to end. The stories suggest new worlds to explore: tender love, sci-fi, politics and prayer, the possibility of the impossible, sunrise and sunset, the sound of God's breath!

Prepare for aha moments. Don Tassone rivals O'Henry in the art of surprise endings, often endings that are the beginnings of a reader's journey into deeper thinking.

-- Patti Normile, author of Prayers for Caregivers