Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas Book

The book is a set of four profound novellas about loneliness: three modernistic and one postmodernistic.
Space wasn't space to Ella, it was signals. Everything was emitting: a flower its scent, a bat its ping, a file its roughness, a lemon its acidity, a girl her gorgeousness, a summer street its summer heat, each muscle its move; space has more waves than the ocean: X rays, radio and television transmissions, walkie-talkie talk, car phone messages, ultraviolets, microwaves, cosmics of all kinds, kids communicating on oatmeal phones, radiations from high-tension lines, signal boxes, transistors and transformers, gazillion pieces of electronic gear leaking information, earth tremors, jet planes, other wakes and winds…
Cartesian sonata is a dualistic tale of madness - two streams of consciousness: wife's and then her husband's, both are rotten and cacophonic. Ella is locked in her insanity and despair and she is absolutely lonely in that prison.
History was here, too. History. Not a life lost, not a thought gone, not a feeling faded, but retained by these things, in the memories they continually encourage, the actions they record, the emotions they represent, not once upon a time, but in the precious present, where the eye sees and the heart beats, and where you clear gutters of leaves whose trees you know and recognize, and you furthermore remember when the soldered copper shone and the roof's slates were reset and how the kitchen will any moment smell of bread like the brightness of the day and where the ladder's shadow falls as though it were a sun clock striking three.
Bed and Breakfast is a story of a lonely man in the world of things. He is a rolling stone. He has no place he could call his own. He resides among the things belonging to the others. He lives in the world of his fantasies. And he desperately tries to escape.
The art of losing isn't hard to master. Emma remembered with gratitude that lesson. But she took it a step further. She lost the sense of loss. She learned to ask nothing of the world. She learned to long for nothing. She didn't require her knives to be sharp. Her knives weren't her knives anyway. She gave up property. She didn't demand dawn. When the snow came she didn't sigh at the thought of shoveling. There was no need for shoveling. Let the snow seal her inside. She'd take her totter about the house instead of the narrow path around the woods. She moved as a draft might from room to room.
Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's is an extremely bleak pastoral. Emma is a captive of poetry, she is an ultimate recluse, she has entirely lost any liaison with the outside world, and there's no way out.
Luther Penner, after many years, had perfected the art of secret revenges. They were pallid, to be sure, these revenges; they were thin; they were trivial and mild compared to the muscular and hearty recoveries of honor that brighten history and make it bearable to read; yet they were revenges so secretly conceived and so deftly executed that the spider might have learned a more entangling web, the wasp a surer sting, by studying them.
The Master of Secret Revenges is a postmodern treatise on vengeance full of exotic outings into religion, mythology, literature and history. It is a sarcastically frilly black comedy of a lone avenger.
Solitude is a bottomless well of sorrows; one may drink out of it lifelong…