Tom Barbash's Short Stories STAY UP WITH ME-Had Me Transfixed

Amer. writer Tom Barbash is both a writer of fiction & nonfiction; known for his account of the 9/11 tragedy in "On Top of the World, Cantor Fitzgerald."  Barbash received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford & the CA Book Award for Best 1st fiction.  This is a writer whose talent's are on par with Updike & Salinger.  Barbash packs an intensity in his short story collection that that is both unforgettable and representative of our era.  Many of the stories are strewn in Manhattan, upstate NY and CA.  His descriptions of locales and weather are blistering.  Some commonalities in topic deal with a death in a family, the ebbs and flows that constitute a family and parent/child relationship.  What makes his stories so intriguing is their voyeuristic nature.  In some, parents are guilty of stalking their children; pushing the boundaries of parental control.  Some have the opposite vantage; parents being scrutinized by their children.  Couples relationships are also examined where love blurs into obsession.  A mother feels an older restaurant hostess is not good enough for her son and the two women come to blows.  A college professor smothers his young lover to where she needs to distance herself.  I could empathize with more than one perspective.  Each story has its own vibrant fascination.  The mercurial, seismic shift in relationships is hard to pinpoint but the aftermath is felt in its fallout.