Introduction by the author... Many of these stories hark back more than fifty years, unwritten stories that lived in me the way stories do, as a bit of memory - a certain smell, the turn of a head, or the particular sound of a voice. Or, in the case of "Love, Mona," in a quilted dime-store night table and a sleeping Mexican painted on a cupboard door. My Brooklyn stories were told through the eyes of a child growing up with the rumble of the El along...