George Anders's Reviews Someone Left the Cake Out in the...

Writing fiction is both response to the world as I find it, and also an activity I've engaged in, if not secretly then privately, across my four decades as a journalist, writer and teacher. I've engaged a wide variety of literary styles; I've published a memoir, a biography, a study of globalization and a a book comtemporary African affairs, based on some 50 visits I made to the region since 2000. Somehow I sandwiched writing fiction in between the spaces in my long publishing career. Below are the titles for 24 stories in my first fiction collection. The title of collection is drawn from the penultimate story, which is also the longest:

1.     The Tryout
2.     The Great Tenandeho White Water Derby
3.     Schopenhauer's Defeat
4.     Annals of Science: The Caldwell Farm
5.     Her First Job

6.     The Mike & Rozzie Show
7.     Esquire
8.     Goats
9.     Immokalee
10. The Pleasures of Pain
11. The Last Hack
12. Out of Print
13. From Chisinau, With Love
14. Leaving Kosovo

15. Ama
16. A Tro-Tro After Dark
17. The Women of Ghana are Trembling
18. The Harmattan
19. Amina's Dream
20. The Queen of Maasai Trio
21. The Elephant Man
22. Carrie Wore A White Bikini
23. Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain
24. The Kidnapper's Lament

Since their initial conception, most stories in Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain have been substantially revised, chiefly in the past five years (the year of first draft of each story is given at the end of each story). Under the influence of Maupassant, Conrad, Kate Chopin, Crane, John O'Hara and the Ugandan fiction writer Doreen Baingana, I came to adopt new (to me) approaches to storytelling and narration. The result was profound: I saw tales familiar to me in a new light, and identified more compelling, animating and pleasing ways to tell them. As an older writer – now in the autumn of my life -- I feel freed enough from past growing pains as a fiction writer to declare, modestly but insistently: I believe in these stories, and I passionately wish to bring them out of the "shadow world" of my private existence and into the public world of my non-fiction writing on history, technological change, computing, African affairs and our globalizing world. As the author of a book originally entitled The Global Me (on publication in 2000), I am not surprised that many of the stories collected here are set around the world and present, in part, the collision of diverse cultures, expectations and life practices. What unites these stories in my mind is suggested by the subtitle, "Stories of Eroded Innocence." In these stories no one ever gets everything he or she wants; no one behaves always well or badly, ethically or immorally, right or wrong. The harsh verdicts of experience – whether delivering the expected or the unexpected -- diminish, degrade and reshape the dreams of my characters, even when they triumph over adversity -- and find dignity, renewed hope and a fresh sense of purity and peace in their sometimes-dangerous, often-delicious lives.

the manual portable typewriter on which I wrote fiction in late 1970s. Demanded a great deal of pounding on tiny keys that struck actual paper!

Writers can't be too careful in an era where words and actions are often confused.

Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain

George Anders's Reviews Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain

April 29, 2026

George Anders's review of Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain: Stories of Innocence Lost

published on Nov 08, 2025 in Goodreads

George Anders writes:

Flashes of brilliance! You may know author G. Pascal Zachary from his extensive nonfiction work -- both as a long-time Wall Street Journal staffer, and as the author of highly respected historical books such as a biography of World War II technologist/futurist Vannevar Bush.

But that's not all that Zachary can do. In this collection of 24 short stories, he tests out his powers in a new genre. Some of these stories are set in the USA; others are set in Africa, but the best of them are anything but parochial. They weave characters and plot together in ways that tantalize.

"Schopenhauer's Defeat" finds the dark humor in a narrator who does not realize he is headed toward calamity. "White Water Derby" is a gentler tale, in which two bumblers come out okay in spite of themselves. And the final reveal in the title story "Cake" made me gasp.

On his website, Zachary owns up to his young-man dreams of joining the likes of Stephen Crane and George Orwell as early-career journalists who grew into legendary story-tellers for the ages.

Now, more than four decades later, he explains that the publication of this short-story collection speaks to "the persistence of my literary dreams, if not the realization of them."

I'm glad he persisted.

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G. Pascal Zachary

Writer, Teacher, Historian

Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain

George Anders's Reviews Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain

From Eudora Welty, Preface to "Collected Stories," 1980:

In praise of Mark Kavanagh, my literary lodestar