Last One Close the Gate: Selected Stories 1988-2008

In twelve richly realized stories, David Taylor Johannesen paints characters entangled by their pasts but moving toward the light of new futures. Two old lovers meet on the streets of New York’s Upper East Side and spend the night reigniting old memories and seizing on missed chances. Sisters, who have gathered to divide their inheritance, overlook the maid who is grieving their mother’s death. A son competes for his distant father’s affections with his father’s secret gay lover. A daughter accompanies her father on a break from college as he meets an old girlfriend. Orphaned siblings reunite late in life to visit the site of their parents’ drowning. Two strangers meet at a rehab ranch and find renewal in each other’s company. In language playful and poetic, Johannesen evokes the wistfulness of bygone loves and the joys of new and unexpected unions and reunions.