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 Petty Offenses & Crimes of the Heart is available from your local book store, or from on-line vendors such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. REVIEWS
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The stories in Mitchell Waldman’s
Petty Offenses and Crimes of the Heart startle a reader with sudden, uncompromising insight. They seem ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives until betrayals, accidents, and misfortune put the puzzles of their weak choices and unfair chance into stark relief when they are left with a kind of clarity they might have been happier not to have. Yet these stories are not moralistic judgments. Readers will come away from this book better for having spent time with Waldman’s well wrought characters, all sprung from the heart of an exacting writer gifted with compassion. — Perry Glasser, author of Dangerous Places. We wrong ourselves as much as we wrong others. Petty Offenses & Crimes of the Heart is a collection of short fiction from Mitchell Waldman, who talks on many topics throughout recent history and the struggles to understand an impossible-to-understand world. With poignancy and wisdom peppered throughout, Petty Offenses & Crimes of the Heart is a read that is well worth considering, highly recommended. — Midwest Book Review, Nov 2011
In Mitchell Waldman's Petty Offenses and Crimes of the Heart, subtle paradoxes and paradigmatic shifts undermine the reader's sense of stable themes. As one example, "The Nazi Next Door" explores the relationship between two neighbors, the first our narrator and descendent of death-sentenced Jews, and the other, Borglund, the son of a Nazi collaborator. The narrator begins leaving poison-hearted gifts at Borglund's door, hoping to inflict shame upon a conscience he imagines as being free of guilt. Instead, the narrator shifts reader sympathy towards Borglund. In the final transition, a conversation reveals to both that, "thrown into the world" from the same historical events that bind their lives in opposite ways, only empathy lies in the void between them. In reaching this and other conclusions, Waldman's writing stays tight, even concise, and by not calling attention to itself all the more reveals everyday life as taking place on a far grander scale than we imagine. |
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