Courting Laura Providencia

Puerto Rican, Russian-Jewish, and Italian cultures collide in homage both to the art and form of the novel, as well as to the passions and histories that fuel our American lives. Pulaski's prose boxes through the surreal and banal. The novel weaves the maelstrom of immigrant life in post WWII New York, and the terrifying solitude of Alzheimer's cloaked beneath Vermont winters, into a fable where the sacred and the profane are inextricably wed. Courting Laura Providencia is a literary devotional.

Laura said she was sure he was the father, packed up her things, and moved out of the apartment. She had been cheerful as she collected her belongings. She said Isaac was the sweetest boy she had ever known, and "a rare thing, muy singular, a Jewish drunk." Isaac wanted to say that was not exactly right, but he was drunk at the time and so he sang to her. Laura snapped the suitcase shut, settled herself in a chair, smiled, and let him sing. For a moment Isaac was stunned. It happened often looking straight into the face of Laura Providencia could cause amnesia, sleepwalking, and archaic longings which might require several lifetimes to understand. He had seen it happen to others.

Jack Pulaski was born and grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. His stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, MSS., and The New England Review, as well as in two anthologies: The Pushcart Prize I and The Ploughshares Reader. He is the recipient of a fiction award from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, and his stories have twice been singled out for high praise in the Nelson Algren Short Fiction Contest. Pulaski currently lives in Vermont.