"In Stealing Cherries, Marina Rubin offers us a collection of precisely chiseled blocks of soulful, funny, heart-rending fiction."—Ted Jonathan, author of Bones & Jokes "Part old-fashioned gal who begs airport security to allow through her dearly departed grandmother's eyebrow tweezers and part Sex in the City sophisticate who leaves another luxurious but disappointing dinner date dreaming of her cold chicken in the fridge, you will surprisingly find yourself somewhere in her stories. Rubin will take you on a gritty but glamorous tour through New Delhi, Italy, Wall Street, the French Riviera, Grand Canyon, and Brooklyn. . . . And still, you will be the one who's running to catch up with her wit, wisdom, and wondrously poetic narratives."—Michael Montlack, author of Cool Limbo Whether she's writing an engaging account of childhood memories from the Ukraine ("Otlichnitsa"), her family's quixotic immigration experiences ("Welcome to America"), or current romantic misadventures ("Curious Things at the W Hotel"), with a unique voice and sharp eye for detail, award-winning author Marina Rubin reveals the triumphant absurdities of contemporary times. Her stories and characters are all too human, too familiar, too flawed, and just glamorous enough to be endearing and unforgettable in these poetic, bite-sized short stories. Marina Rubin's writing has appeared in more than seventy literary journals and magazines. Her family emigrated from the former Soviet Union seeking political asylum in 1989. She is an associate editor of Tribeca's literary and art magazine, Mudfish and a 2013 recipient of COJECO's prestigious Blueprint Fellowship. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.

In the middle of the last century, in a small remote town lost in the foothills of the magnificent Caucasus Mountains, the local children raid their neighbours’ fruit orchards during the summer holidays. The best apples for Pasha, the nine-year old boy, are behind the impenetrable fence of the Glumins, a weird Old-Believer couple who live next door, and in the orchard of a wicked neighbour, Bullin. Bullin is a cruel man who inflicts suffering on animals and deserves to be punished. There are plenty of other orchards where the children of River End Street can satisfy their fruit hunger. The cherries of the old couple living by the riverbank can be reached by climbing up the fence, and it is possible to get away unnoticed. Or is it? Fruit adventures are risky and some end up in near disaster. There are scary stories about fruit thieves who are cruelly punished. Yet Pasha absolutely had to steal some of his neighbours’ tantalising apples. He tried and ended up being caught. But what would the punishment be?

Four boys on a pitch-black night in a neighborhood near Philadelphia called the Hill, went to a home to steal cherries from trees in front of a house. While in the trees picking and eating, they witnessed a double homicide. They barely escaped but were seen. The murders were the work of the Philadelphia mob, who returned to the Hill to identify the four kids and silence them permanently. The mobsters figured it would be easy until they encountered problem after problem. The kids on the Hill banded together to fight back. Unexpectedly, the ax madman killer, the Badger, is sent from Luzzi, Italy, to take care of business. He kills not with guns but with axes. But on who's side is the Badger? A page-turner from start to finish, a can't put down read.

This manuscript is one of kind, nothing has ever been written like it before, the story begins in 1941 with the first memory I can date and what I remember and explains why I grew up so completely different from the majority of other children that I went to school with. I begin in Petaluma California as a small boy and continue through the years telling of the hardships, struggles and sorrows my family and relatives faced as they worked and camped in the different orchards on Highway 99 or the 101 and barely making enough money to feed them and buy gas to the next job. Then during the winter each year Dad worked on chicken ranches or such until the spring when we would start all over again. That happened until the summer of 1949 when my family settled in Yountville California and where the story ends when I joined the Navy at age seventeen on the 18th of January 1955.