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A taboo-breaking debut collection of stories about ageing, relationships - and sex

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A woman goes about certain rituals of sex with her second husband, sharing the bed with the ghosts of her sexual past. A beautiful young art student embarks on an affair with a much older, married, famous artist. A middle-aged woman struggles with the decline of her mother, once glamorous and still commanding; their fraught relationship causes unexpected feelings both shaming and brutal. A man finds that his father has died while in the midst of extra-marital sex and wonders what he should do with the body. And a boy sits in his Calculus class, fantasizing about a schoolmate´s breasts and worrying about his father lying in hospital, as outside his classroom window the Twin Towers begin to fall.

In this stunning, taboo-breaking debut, Arlene Heyman, a practicing psychiatrist, gives us what really goes on in people´s minds, relationships, and beds. Raw, tender, funny, truthful and often shocking, Scary Old Sex is a fierce exploration of the chaos and beauty of life.

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What an astonishing collection! I absolutely loved these stories, so stylish, earthy and funny - and underneath them, thrumming away, a sense of our own mortality Deborah Moggach

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Arlene Heyman is the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Robert Wood Johnson Fellowships. Her short stories have appeared in The New American Review and she won Epoch magazine´s novella contest. She´s been listed twice in the honour rolls of Best American Short Stories. Heyman is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, where she lives with her husband. She is currently at work on a novel.

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