The Cusp of Dreams

NOVEL. A sequence of fast-moving stories about the competitive inhumane world of corporate America. Sheets knows this environment from the inside out and recreates the verbal bluster stunted emotions and real pain of her characters with great authenticity. She is the John Cheever of sales management.Christoph Irmscher professor of English at Indiana University. Diana Sheets''s slate-hard realism in The Cusp of Dreams an unvarnished look at the predatory world of American corporate combat serves as a welcome antidote to the often frivolous word-games of extreme postmodern experimental fiction. The last chapter brings Gatsby''s funeral to mind.Howard Wolf Emeritus Professor Department of English State University of New York at Buffalo. In The Cusp of Dreams Diana Sheets unveils in one lively vignette after another the human comedy of life in sales. People operate on assumptions that just aren''t so they inflate the banal stuff of their affairs to dramatic proportions and everybody schemes. For Sheets the lesson is this: ''you never ever have a clue as far as people are concerned.''Mark Bauerlein professor of English at Emory University. Sheets has written a novel that is sociological...and psychological addressing the concerns of modern men and women in the skullduggery of sales and business. A roller coaster of a ride....Read it over the weekend and weep.Michael F. Shaughnessy professor of psychology Eastern New Mexico University at Portales. The Cusp of Dreams is a tragicomedy. It is the dark saga of our time: men and women desperate to close penny-ante deals in order to pay next months rent. To survive they will do almost anything. Yet despite their treachery toward others they themselves are at risk of losing it alltheir jobs their relationships and their families. For these men and women living on the cusp there is no reprieve. The novel was inspired by Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman and David Mamets Glengarry Glen Ross. ABOUT THE AUTHORDiana E. Sheets worked in sales and sales management in the metropolitan New York region for twelve years after receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She relocated to Champaign Illinois in 1998 to write fiction. Convinced that sanctimonious virtue faux consciousness confessional memoir and estrogen-saturated femininity have killed fiction she posts her literary criticism and political commentary as well as some of her fiction on her website literarygulag.. Funding for this novel has been provided courtesy of the Illinois Campus Research Board at the University of Illinois. The chapters The Cusp of Dreams I Can Getcha Close Fleur-de-Lis Cold Comfort and Ashes Out of Phoenix were workshopped at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Excerpts from the chapters Embers and Ashes Out of Phoenix from The Cusp of Dreams were published in Sensations Magazine respectively in Spring 2005 and Winter 2002. Special thanks to John & Sally Thomason and Jim & Brannan Galyean for their extraordinary Southern hospitality. Nonetheless Cold Comfort is filtered through a decidedly Yankee sensibility and does not reflect the views of my gracious hosts.. I am grateful to Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist for ednews.org who has interviewed me about The Cusp of Dreams and the ramifications of the Literary Gulag vis--vis literature and politics today.