Dangerous Places

Fiction. Fear and dread transform Glasser's characters, who include an abused single mother, a female college student in New York and a retired leadership trainer. All the characters run but cannot escape the images of danger that threaten them. "There is no showing off, no fancy footwork, no faking it," writes Gary Gildner, who selected DANGEROUS PLACES for the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. Booklist calls these "finely crafted and original stories" and writes that Glasser's characters "stumble on danger in the least likely places: grocery stores, shopping malls, backyards, and bedrooms." Lee K. Abbott writes, "The most dangerous places in Dangerous Places? Between our ears, it turns out, and in our needy hearts." Ron Carlson observes of Glasser and his characters: "He knows people. He understands the insistent magic of their ordinary dreams." Phillip Gerard writes that "Glasser is that rare writer whose stories unfold with the precision of a Swiss watch," and Ron Hansen called these stories "fabulous, funny, wildly different."