¶ … Star Cafe by Mary Caponegro Written in a surrealistic and sexualized style that immediately captures the reader's attention, Mary Caponegro's dazzling short story The Star Cafe was originally published 1990 as part of the author's larger collection of short stories. Through her combination of strikingly original language and strong storytelling skills, Caponegro succeeds in transforming the abstract yearnings which consume Carol, the protagonist of The Star Cafe, into a coherent and creative narrative capable of captivating readers from the first lines onward. Indeed, the opening line of The Star Cafe signals the dreamlike tone to come in later pages, as Caponegro guides us through the maze of Carol's thoughts after she hears a mysterious noise, remarking...

By so accurately describing the complexity of human consciousness in real time, through the meandering thought process Carol engages in throughout the story, Caponegro succeeds in achieving every great fiction writer's ultimate goal: the replication of ordinary existence in extraordinary prose.
The plot of The Star Cafe is centered on Carol's encounter with a stranger who may or may not be real, and the increasingly intimate experience she shares with him while trapped in her own fantasies. When Carol and the strange…