📕 These stories illustrate the paradox that fiction is an opening to truth. Each story brings out the truth of a person, time and place while it also is a devoted search for truth. Through the characters portrayed, the real protagonist that knits life together is a searing hunger for emotional reality, the truth of our being. And as readers, we feel the sharp, undulating realities of emotional life as they reveal truths of a moment, of an individual, of a zeitgeist. The more we can bear, the more we can grow. Merle Molofsky, a psychoanalyst and poet, takes us on adventures with and through the human spirit. Michael Eigen, The Challenge of Being Human These are all extraordinary stories, spanning the range from realistic and socially penetrating commentary to the most philosophically speculative. Emphasis is on strong characterization, bringing out a picture of the essential self, whether in conflict with the imposition of social limitations, conflicting notions of who one is, or the struggle to arrive at personal integrity. Wondrous situations are presented that expand upon the conventionally realistic and seem to draw on aspects of magical realism, science fiction and the psychoanalytic merging of past and present experience in the mind.Lee Jenkins, Right of PassageNecessary Voices are exceptionally necessary for those of us who wish to hear stories of an authentic life. Merle Molofsky has written about people we think we know or knew, with exquisite details of what it means t...