The here and now

the long version

The Here and Now is the story of a chance encounter and the tumult that ensues when opposites (or apparent ones) turn into strange attractors. Samuel Karnish, a no-longer-quite-so-young editor at a Manhattan newsmagazine, has watched his career run aground, his marriage disintegrate, and his worldview shrink almost to the vanishing point. On the flight to his best friend Warren Pinsky's third wedding, he finds himself thrust into an awkward friendship with a young Hasidic couple from Brooklyn, a friendship that leads him on a strange and provocative odyssey and sends him reeling in the direction of what may be his truest self. As we are drawn in to the lives of this unlikely threesome, we see the moral confusions and crossed purposes that threaten believers and nonbelievers alike with estrangement from others and themselves.