When God tells Levidow to buy a big blue car and get out of town, he dares to think that his suffering might be over. Instead he begins a journey that will put him out on the open highway with a reincarnation of himself as a much younger man, a hideous woman, and an oversupply of Dr. Brown's soda. His is just one of the journeys undertaken by the characters of From Hunger. With wit and irony, Gerald Shapiro leads us from a London park to the streets of Chicago, from the Vietnam War Memorial to a New York art gallery, as his characters search for sustenance in a world full of hunger. In a stroke of brilliance, solitary Altshuler, the failing, forty-ish shoe designer of the title story, invents an open-toed, stiletto-heeled hiking boot that makes him rich. But money doesn't satisfy his unnamed longing. When his 380-pound Uncle Phil comes to visit, Altshuler learns that there are cravings even greater than his own. "I been hungry my whole life", Uncle Phil says, as he eats his way through barbecued ribs and bags of corn chips, toward an inevitable finale with a meatball sandwich. During his annual research trip to London in "Golders Green", Ted Lustig, an inept scholar, searches for purpose in the life of an obscure German writer whose greatest achievement was his own suicide. Lustig is obsessed with the writer whose brilliant failure mimics his own. But when he meets the aging Anna Peltzman, he begins to realize that meaning isn't always revealed in dramatic moments, but rather in far more puzzling ways. Lenny Schrank is inexplicably drawn to the city of his father's youth in "The Community Seder", where he happens upon a mysterious synagogue filled with faces from his past. "Let anyonewho is hungry, come in and eat", chants the congregation. What Lenny finds at the Passover celebration is an exquisite recognition of all that is missing from his life - and a brief moment of community. With wonderfully idiosyncratic characters and deft use of detail, Gerald Shapiro takes us beyond the grimness of the lives of his characters to reveal the hunger - and the hope - in us all.

Ira Mittelman, the middle-aged hero of "A Box of Ashes," one of two novellas in Little Men, is wrestling with a dilemma: should he fulfill his late father's dying wish by taking the old man's ashes back to Missouri, to scatter them on the grounds of Camp HaHaTonka, the Boy Scout camp where Ira spent several summers as a boy? It's a long way to go just to dump some ashes, and if Ira makes this pilgrimage, his absence might jeopardize the fragile relationship he's managed to maintain with his ex-wife (they're still having sex every Friday night). In "Spivak in Babylon," Little Men 's other novella, it's 1982, and Leo Spivak, an ambitious 30-year-old copywriter at a large Chicago advertising agency, is about to get his big break: a chance to go to Hollywood to participate for the first time in the filming of a television commercial. A week in Hollywood, on the company's expense account! A room at the fabled Chateau Marmont (Garbo's old suite, in fact)! The only problem is the subject of the commercial itself: a new feminine hygiene spray to be marketed to pre-adolescent girls. Hovering over all the proceedings in "Spivak in Babylon" is the genial, befuddled presence of President Ronald Reagan, the Leader of the Free World, who haunts Leo's dreams.