Richard Ascher

Richard Ascher is a true New Yorker. With the exception of a two year stint in the army, he’s never lived anywhere else. His stories reflect New York life from 1945-2010. He was a dentist, saxophone player, college basketball player and has a love for jazz, modern art and old film noire movies. These themes weave through the fictional narrative of his book “Bobby’s Song.”

Richard Ascher knows the sights and smells of a working class Brooklyn walkup, the Upper East Side luxury building, the town houses of the West Side intellectuals and the tenements and bars of the Greenwich Village 1980’s hipster/drug scene. He knows all the trains to Queens, the many cultures in the melting pot of the city that never melted, but just rubbed with friction against one another to survive as best they could. Richard Ascher can describe the happiness of being young and playing school yard basketball. He’s been in the bedlam of the motor vehicle bureau and the dank sadness of a police station after midnight. He knows the loneliness in the crowded streets, the reaching out for some human kindness and the beat of the city that drives people mad even though they can’t live without it. He knows the sleazy politicos and the self-serving “holy men.” Over the years he’s heard all the tales of how to get a man or woman or (more importantly) get rid of one and how to build up a thriving business or burn it down for the insurance.

In Ricard Ascher’s New York, is hope around the next corner or is it someone who is crazier and more delusional than you are? After a lifetime of listening to peoples’ stories, he retired from dentistry and decided to write them in a fictionalized form. All are written with humor and sympathy. He loves his fellow New Yorkers and understands them. Growing up in the Bronx, if your neighbor tried to kill his sweet old grandmother, they said “It was just his way, he must have had a good reason.” You’re a neighbor, we love you, you’re family. You can do no wrong.