Mark Mirsky

Mark Mirsky was born in Boston and grew up on Blue Hill Avenue which runs through the former towns of Dorchester, Roxbury and old Mattapan. He attended the Boston Public Latin School, Harvard College and Stanford University. He is the editor of Fiction and an Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York. His stories and articles have appeared in The New Directions Annual, The Progressive, The Boston Sunday Globe, The New York Sunday Times Book Review, The Washington and Partisan Review.

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The Secret Table

Mark Mirsky is a miracle worker. He has the tears of comedy, the laughter of tragedy, and the speaking voice of life — all in a stylization that lets us know instantly we are in the presence of a great teller of tales. I hope never to miss a word he writes.

John Ciardi

The Secret Table

Mark Mirsky

1975

Hardcover
ISBN 978-0-914590-10-1

Quality Paper
ISBN 978-0-914590-11-8

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Now in The Secret Table, Mark Mirsky sets side by side two novellas of young men embracing a mystical past. In “Dorchester, Home and Garden,” a thirty-year-old adolescent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. “Onan’s Child” recasts this narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife, Tamar. It is a tale of a Kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed.