Abstract

Last Call is a collection of occasional short stories, all of which, are set between the first year of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. While the stories do not deal directly with the politics of this last and most unnerving decade of the Cold War, the events and, especially, the "mood" of the era serve as the environment in which ordinary people attempt to survive extraordinary and often bizarre social circumstances. The stories in Last Call are written in a realistic and spare manner, to heighten the sense of anxiety which was a "natural" condition of life at that time. I selected this style precisely because minimalism in literature is an effective means of emotionally segregating the reader from the protagonist. The purpose of Last Call is to illustrate the relative horror of living with the threat of nuclear extinction, environmental decay, and the collapse of social and behavioral norms.