Bruce Kellner:

The Honesties of Love

A Novel. 248 pages.

1. Book version: ISBN 9781595692306 or PayPal. 5.5 x 8.5 in (21,5 cm x 14 cm)

2. eBook version: Google Play / Kindle

Bruce Kellner has published books on such celebrated figures as Ralph Barton, Charles Demuth, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten and Donald Windham. A scholar of the Harlem Renaissance during the Jazz Age, Kellner compiled the first encyclopedia covering that period in American history. A Professor Emeritus of English at Millersville University, he lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

A turn of the century comedy in which traditions clash with independence to remind us of how quickly social mores change, and of what dangers lurk at every new turn.

In this comedy of bad manners, the ill-matched parents of too young newly-weds Billy and Ann Richardson politely collide in a series of encounters guaranteed to insure catastrophe, when a wry college professor, a glamorous real estate agent, a randy plumber, and a frustrated housewife politely face off on some social and sexual battlefields.

The confrontations may begin politely, but they are guaranteed to end in chaos when a husband and a wife—not each other's—find themselves embroiled in an affair that proves to be equally passionate and ridiculous.

What begins as a test between social classes ends in a series of sexual confrontations. Billy and Ann find themselves forced to grow up in a hurry to begin to accept their parents as people who are just as vulnerable as everybody else.

Far from the pastoral romance of Winter Ridge (published by Mondial in 2008) and the grim landscape of The Prettiest Girls in Euphoria, Kansas (Mondial, 2010), Bruce Kellner's novel The Honesties of Love turns a baleful eye on the minefield of marriage.