David Puretz, a lecturer of writing at Yeshiva College, will have his novel Portrait of an Escapist published in Spring 2019 by Global City Press. Portrait of an Escapist is a work of “metanarration,” a story about a young writer on a quest to find his Iraq War veteran father after he slips out the back door of his Baltimore home with just the clothes on his back and vanishes into the night. “Writing fiction is complicated,” said Puretz, “but it’s even more complicated to write a work of fiction about a fiction writer. But that’s what I wanted to do when I set out to write this novel. The protagonist, Billy Crab, uses writing at first as a way to express himself, to make sense of his world and his place and purpose within it, but ultimately he uses writing as a way to escape himself, escape his world. The novel plays with these layered issues related to the act of writing and the need for storytelling to escape our own realities and live, at least briefly, through others.” Puretz is also the managing editor of the literary journal Global City Review and currently at work on Legacies, the press’s first digital issue commemorating its 25-year history, slated for publication in February 2019. Global City Review “is constructed around a single theme…while maintaining a mix of post-modern literary criticism and progressive world views” (Library Journal) and “is a rich treasury of contemporary social thought and artistic expressions, defending a humanistic view of the individual in a complex society” (Multicultural Review).