“Fresh and alert, these stories of people engaging, meeting, dealing with their needs and desires. A rich experience reading about others who so often reflect ourselves.”
—Richard Lyons, author of the novels The Edge of Things and Divisible by One and the collection of short stories, A Wilderness of Love and Faith

“Santa Barbara, Russ Desaulnier’s sixth collection, has a subtle, quiet way of delving into quixotic relationships and transitory affairs that were part of Southern California in the sixties and seventies. The Old Topanga Road, The Unravished Bride and Sin City stand out for touching the bittersweet sides of romance.”
—Dan Armstrong, author of The Eyes of Archimedes Trilogy and the novels Princeton Charlie’s Got the Blues and Stella

“Santa Barbara is both a location and a state of mind, a place where the characters in these stories find and lose love, venture both awkwardly and gracefully through new experiences, make bold escapes, and discover the limits of fidelity, gratitude and courage. They are, to use a fine phrase from these pages, “strangers in a changed town.”
—Ross West, Author of the short story collection, The Fragile Blue Dot

Russ Desaulnier lived the first half of his life in Southern California where he was educated and worked in a variety of jobs and traveled extensively around the world. In midlife he married and moved to Japan where he taught English at a university for nearly two decades. Santa Barbara is his sixth collection of short stories. He now lives in Eugene, Oregon with his wife.