Flying Home

the long version

"In Flying Home, David Nicholson writes of the real Washington, D.C., a secret city worlds away from the heroic statues, white marble monuments, and broad, tree-lined avenues. His characters are ordinary working men and women -- maids, taxi drivers, janitors, barbers and handymen. While the women in his first collection of stories are vivid and fully realized, Nicholson is particularly concerned with fathers, sons and brothers. The men in his stories are men in extremis -- a boy-man who seeks to belong without understanding what it will cost him, a janitor who has lost his job and now must teach his son what it is to be a man, and, in the title story, a Smithsonian curator reluctantly making the long journey back to the streets he fled years before. Theirs is a city of neighborhoods and back-porch summer nights, a city where men swap lies in barber shops, toasts are proclaimed on street corners, and fathers pray their legacy will, one day, allow their children to stand on their own"--Back cover.