Marine Park: Stories

Weaving together the rich and complex life of an oft forgotten area of Brooklyn, New York, Mark Chiusano’s affecting debut story collection, Marine Park, captures a neighborhood throughout generations and lives filled with ambition, hope, fear, failure, redemption, and nostalgia. Mostly set in the eponymous neighborhood located off Jamaica Bay in the far reaches of Brooklyn, these stories explore the neighborhood’s unique culture through family, sports, drugs, love, and the sense of community that creates the human spirit. In many of the stories involving adolescent brothers, the author explores the fragility of youth and the vagaries of growing up, and along the way brings to life the very core of a blue-collar neighborhood and the impact that pride can bring both to those who leave and those who have been left behind.