Publications

Phil’s literary fiction focuses on social issues

Dreams Exchanged appeared in BULL Men’s Fiction in March 2020

A 20-year-old Greek American man is asked by a Latina who is a Dreamer to take in a teenage cousin from El Salvador, a hard-working kitchen helper who escaped a customs agent sweep of illegal immigrants. He makes room in his small apartment and befriends the teenager, only to witness another sweep of undocumented men and women that forces restaurants throughout the New York region to close.

Discovered by Elton John appeared in fictionjunkies in October 2018

A workaday department store display artist is astonished to learn that Elton John purchased one of his paintings and commissioned a second one. This, he thinks, is his big break, and he envisions mingling with celebrities. Word of his sale gets around his New Jersey suburb, and when a seductive neighbor is attracted to him, his wife sends him packing.

The Buzzing appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle in June 2018

A retired school principal admires the migrating Canada geese that alight on his backyard pond but fights with a neighbor who flies drones like warplanes to frighten the birds away. This leads to a dispute over how people should appreciate the environment (The Buzzing was included in the anthology The Vicarious Traveler).

The Church appeared in The Delmarva Review, Vol. 10, in November 2017

A sandwich maker at a Manhattan kosher cafeteria thinks he overhears two new delegates to the United Nations negotiating Middle East peace and Palestinian statehood. But he becomes the peacemaker when a scuffle breaks out among the long line of customers trying to get into the popular Midtown eatery (Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and adapted into a radio play by an NPR affiliate).

Iron Horse appeared in Fiction on the Web in July 2017

A retired railroad gateman stands trackside and uses hand signals to give freight train engineers raceway tips as they pass. A teenage boy sees this and asks the old man to help him escape an abusive home. The man realizes he should have left home, too, when he was young, so he flags down a locomotive so the boy can climb on board.

The Telescope appeared in The Corvus Review in July 2016

At his doctor’s advice, a widowed Manhattan executive with early Alzheimer’s keeps his mind active by looking through a telescope his son set up in a top-floor penthouse. From a distance, he sees a woman at a commuter station he once sat with on his ride to work and wants to have a relationship with her—over his son’s objections.

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