The five com­pelling tales com­pris­ing Loli­ta at Leonard’s of Great Neck and Oth­er Sto­ries from the Before Times take you on an immer­sive jour­ney from 1974 to the 2000s. Eigh­teen-year-old Anna, a Jew­ish col­lege stu­dent, meets a Ger­man busi­ness­man at a Greek din­er on Queens Boule­vard. Claire Seltzer of Great Neck has the hon­ey­moon from hell in Paris. Rebec­ca, a spunky eighth grad­er, is in love with Mr. Miller, her math teacher. Sarah Rein­hardt, the wife of a celebri­ty doc­tor liv­ing in Cen­tral Park West, finds her­self in a com­pli­cat­ed love tri­an­gle. Rachel Rosensweig awak­ens one morn­ing to find that her hus­band of thir­ty years, a Colum­bia pro­fes­sor, has become a dan­ger­ous rad­i­cal.

The char­ac­ters of this unfor­get­table col­lec­tion inhab­it the gold­en era of the post­war, pre-pan­dem­ic world. Age-old pow­er strug­gles — between lovers, between friends, between par­ents and chil­dren— are illu­mi­nat­ed and ana­lyzed. Heart­break­ing and some­times hilar­i­ous, their sto­ries dis­close and doc­u­ment what it meant to be Amer­i­can, Jew­ish, and female. Rich with cul­tur­al touch­stones and ref­er­ence points, they are suf­fused with self-aware­ness, long­ing, and sen­su­al awareness.