Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends—they all get into the act in Michael Mirolla's Lessons in Relationship Dyads. Harsh lessons, sweet lessons, bitter lessons, faux lessons, —these are tales that probe not just the primary relationships all humans "enjoy" but also the relationships involved in the act of storytelling itself. These stories rise from fiction to metafiction without ever forgetting that the central beat, the central electrical pulse, in any tale must come from the heart.

Michael Mirolla's publications include a punk-inspired novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; three novels: Berlin (a Bressani Prize winner); The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named Giulio battles for freedom from his own creator; a short story collection, The Formal Logic of Emotion; and three collections of poetry. His story "A Theory of Discontinuous Existence" was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, featuring the year's best short stories, while "The Sand Flea" was nominated for the US Pushcart Prize.