Condor Dreams & Other Fictions

Gerald W. Haslam, the author of Straight White Male and other award-winning titles, is professor emeritus of English at Sonoma State University. He lives in Northern California.

In this collection of twenty-five short stories, Gerald Haslam explores the rural areas and small towns of his native region - California's Great Central Valley. The stories reveal a principally masculine cast that is as culturally diverse, and sometimes as zany, as Westerners actually are - a Chinese laborer, a Portuguese farmer, a Vietnamese schoolboy, a black cowboy, an Okie rowdy, an Armenian poet, plus some who blend those and other ingredients. The opening story, "Condor Dreams", is a reflective and delicately instructive tale of a father and son and their connection with the California condor that serves as a metaphor for the region's traditional way of life. "Scars" is a poignant examination of the life of a young man victimized by his alcoholic mother. In "Rising Action", fifteen-year-old Ernest alternately yearns for his first sexual encounter and seeks out a confessor to save him from purgatory. In "Mal de Ojo", Haig regales his gullible charge with the tale of the longest fistfight in small-town history. These pieces range from traditional stories to vignettes to sketches and tales as Haslam seeks literary structures that powerfully project his characters and their experiences. The author's triumph in these stories is that, by making us care about his characters and their habitats, he allows us to care more about ourselves and our land.