Hazards To The Human Heart:
Stories of the Here and Now

Spare, humorous, and dazzlingly perceptive, Thomas Farber's stories are about people caught up in the emotional contradictions of the way we live now. They are people who are undone or obsessed by oridinary problems, never able to transcend the material plane. They are people who are always in the midst of love, whatever its cost, whatever its pitfalls. They are people we know so well they may be our very own selves.

Critical Praise

"...stunning..to be reread and remembered with pleasure."

--Chicago Tribune

"...sharply conceived and briskly executed...his prose is as spare and specifying as black-and-white photography."

--The Nation

"...lithe, casually tender short stories...Farber continues to write gently and compassionately of major moments in minor lives--real people paddling doggedly, furiously against the current."

           --Kirkus Reviews

"...delicately crafted..."
         

--Publishers Weekly

"The stories...are so alive that each seems to have its own heartbeat and pulse. They are funny and disturbing and wise; Thomas Farber has written a truly wonderful book."

          --Alice Hoffman, author of The Drowning Season

Beautiful, strong, touching, luminous, Farber creates life itself in and through the short story.

--Thomas Cottle, author of Children's Secrets

"...a genuine, classic talent that deserves comparison with Chekhov and Turgenev...a poet in prose clothing."

        --Barry Gifford, author of Landscape with Traveler

"Meticulously written...glinting with humor."

         --Cleveland Plain Dealer

"'Whatever the cost' is as moving and warm as O'Henry's 'Gift of the Magi.'"

        --Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Farber's creations are tight, controlled and spare...perfectly molded to his subjects. Possessed of a fine eye for detail...and a sense of life's mutability, he is a writer who carefully plots each word, a stylist for whom syllables are necessarily vital. As he developes his scenes and plots his surprises, Farber retains a deceptive simplicity, never intruding but alays capable of knifing into the reader's consciousness."

         --Bay Views

"In these stories, Farber is at once anatomist and ironist: a rare combination of talents."

        --Peter Collier, author of The Kennedys

"verbal felicity; his scintillating right-on prose..[Farber's] thoroughly serious and sensitive word-wit."

         --Lone Star Book Review

"It takes only a few pages to realize that it is impossible to look away, that it will be impossible to forget. Farber's sentences are graced with intricate detail, placed down on the pages with meticulous care and precision...He writes as though no one has ever thought about love before, and as though these are just his first few words on the subject. Let's hope so.

         --Leah Garchik

"He has done an excellent job of capturing the uncertainty of our times as well as expressing the tenuousness of our hold on one another"

        -- St Louis Post Dispatch

"sharp insights into the vexing tangle of human relationships."

      -- San Francisco Examiner