Guy Ridley

Guy Ridley, in his late fifties, runs a second-hand bookstore near an urban university in the American Midwest. He understands academic procedures and might have been a scholar and teacher himself, but now he walks along a parallel road that no academic would take. Devoted to Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote, he writes short stories to express his insights as he struggles with several challenges:

1. He and the wife he still loves have been separated for many years. He’d like them to get back together.
2. He wants to resolve an old scandal that precipitated his wife’s departure from the school’s biology department while others stayed behind and still work mischief.
3. He suffers from intermittent attacks of mental impairment during which he believes that demons assault him. At such times, he imagines that Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho will rescue him.