Sometimes we find ourselves in unexpected and peculiar situations. What makes us stronger—and extraordinary—is the grace with which we handle ourselves during those times. In “Paternity Test” two new fathers are coming to terms with parenthood, both in the middle of personal dilemmas. “Everyone Says I’m Dorothy” tells the story of a costume shop owner that can’t understand why someone who is the spitting image of a well-known celebrity resents it so much. “Kum Ba Yah” deals with a man who discovers that his recently deceased grandmother had been keeping a secret, one which deals directly with a significant piece of Americana. The title story features a man visiting the Holy Land with his family, where his mother exhibits some behaviors that don’t reconcile with his memory of her. A majority of the stories in the collection are on this theme; the remaining stories cover ideas ranging from a zoo administrator trying to manage an unlikely protest (“Setting Loose the Marmosets”), to a man making a pilgrimage to a John Cage-related function in Germany in place of his late wife (“Six Three Nine”), to a pair of stories dealing with the discovery of baby mice in a tent bag (“A Wake” and “At Some Point, You Were New”).




Peter Barlow serves as an adjunct professor at University of Detroit Mercy. He has one other collection of short fiction, Little Black Dots (Chatter House Press, 2017).



Title: Dancing on the Via Dolorosa: Short Stories
Author: Peter Barlow
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Publisher Website: https://adelaidebooks.org/
Publisher Email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1955196857
Price: $19.60
Page Count: 242 pages
Format: Paperback

Description of the company: ADELAIDE BOOKS LLC is a New York based independent company dedicated to publishing literary fiction and creative nonfiction. It was founded in July 2017 as an imprint of the Adelaide Literary Magazine, with the aim to facilitate publishing of novels, memoirs, and collections of short stories, poems, and essays by contributing authors of our magazine and other qualified writers.We believe that in doing so, we best fulfill the mission outlined in Adelaide Magazine – “to promote writers we publish, helping both new and emerging, and established authors reaching a wider literary audience.”

Our motto is: We don’t publish classics, we make classics.