In this, his second published book set in Coney Island through the latter half of the 20th century, the author focuses primarily on an aging professor who has found sympathetic conditions of environment in which to ruminate on his experiences and destiny. He lives in a rundown hotel located in the heart of the amusement area, with ready access to secret places and intermittent encounters. A variety of Island transients and dreamers also appear in these dark tales.

In this, his second published book set in Coney Island through the latter half of the 20th century, the author focuses primarily on an aging professor who has found sympathetic conditions of environment in which to ruminate on his experiences and destiny. He lives in a rundown hotel located in the heart of the amusement area, with ready access to secret places and intermittent encounters. A variety of Island transients and dreamers also appear in these dark tales.

"On the afternoon of August 28th 1909 Sigmund Freud visited Coney Island's famous Dreamland amusement park. A hundred years later this lively and imaginative book examines his legacy in Coney Island. It begins with Norman Klein's reconstruction of his actual visit. However Freud's real impact appears to have come later with the founding of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Zoe Beloff conjures up the world of this unique Society, whose forward-thinking attitude flourished from1926 through the early 1970s. The Society's members, most of them working people from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, wished to participate in one of the great intellectual movements of the 20th century. She explores their activities that included recreating their dreams on film and discusses the role of the society's visionary founder Albert Grass who attempted to rebuild Dreamland according to Freud's theory of dream formation."--From publisher's website, http://www.christineburgin.com

Fiction. "The facts are simple enough: In September, 1909, a relatively unknown Freud spent a week in New York City, en route to a lecture series upstate at Clark University. The air ranged from muggy to stifling. The museum exhibition on antiquities, the one he had high hopes for, proved substandard. The crowds on the street smelled of industrial fluids and sweat. Even friendly faces made him squirm. The conductor on a tram tried to be empathetic: he ordered the crowd to make room for 'the old man.' But Freud did not see himself as old, not yet." Thus begins this off-the-wall collection from the author of The History of Forgetting. Pitched somewhere between fiction and essay, between short story and novella, FREUD IN CONEY ISLAND AND OTHER TALES uses what are possibly actual facts from the eminent psychoanalyst's life to produce beautifully meandering engagements with topics ranging from the work of Lissitzky to laserographic confocal search methods to the ideas of Freud himself.

The third period was that of the nickel empire when the subways reached the island, the great hordes arrived, and Coney grew cheap and garish. In its fourth period, Coney Island became a beautiful seaside park."--BOOK JACKET.

Travel with eleven writers, including Kij Johnson, Maureen F McHugh, Mike Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Lawrence Watt-Evans, to Coney Island's gateway on the ragged edge of North America, where Merlin haunts the deserted amusement rides, memory is more real than desire, and the dark Atlantic surges behind a bathroom mirror.

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Arial;}} \viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2057\fs18 Coney Island, 1911: Coralie Sardie is the daughter of a self-proclaimed scientist and professor who acts as the impresario of The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a boardwalk freak show offering amazement and entertainment to the masses. An extraordinary swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid alongside performers like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl,and a 100 year old turtle, in her father's ""museum"". She swims regularly in New York's Hudson River, and one night stumbles upon a striking young man alone in the woods photographing moon-lit trees. From that moment, Coralie knows her life will never be the same. \par The dashing photographer Coralie spies is Eddie Cohen, a Russian immigrant who has run away from his father's Lower East Side Orthodox community. As Eddie photographs the devastation on the streets of New York following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, he becomes embroiled in the mystery behind a young woman's disappearance and the dispute between factory owners and labourers. In the tumultuous times that characterized life in New York between the world wars, Coralie and Eddie's lives come crashing together in Alice Hoffman's mesmerizing, imaginative, and romantic new novel. \par }