Writer J. Robert Lennon sets many of his stories in a town a lot like Ithaca, and finds inspiration even in everyday interactions in such a setting.

"It's cosmopolitan in a way, but it's still a small town," he said Oct. 26 at a Literary Luncheon at the home of President David Skorton and Professor Robin Davisson.

"There's no way you're not going to run into your ex-husband in Wegmans," he said. "There's a lot of potential for social awkwardness here."

Lennon, an associate professor of English at Cornell, is an acclaimed and prolific author whose writings "reveal a deep sense of comedy as well as tragedy," Davisson said in her introduction.

Deciding not to read from his novel-in-progress, Lennon said he chose a selection of "writings over the past 10 years or so that take place in my fake Ithaca."

These included a few of the 100 "very short stories" in his 2005 collection "Pieces for the Left Hand" and the opening pages of his 2003 novel "Mailman" (a black comedy set in Nestor, N.Y., Lennon's fictional stand-in for Ithaca).

"A lot of this book comes from reading local newspapers," he said of the story collection.

The short stories were satirical slices of life, often occurring in and around a major university. Students take risky "high-speed joyrides" down to a lake below on an unfinished "water-cooled air" sluice in "Pipeline." An anthropologist and a historian publicly debunk a farmer's hoax in "The Obelisk of Interlaken" and only succeed in making the prankster more popular and likeable. Another prank, by an art student in "Mikeworld" (with a setting based on Ithaca's Sagan Planet Walk), turns out to curse the artist years after his illegitimate planet marker is removed at public expense.

"I'm delighted by the town-gown tensions in any town ... and I like when these tensions explode into the public eye," Lennon said.

"'Mailman,'" he said, "is about a guy who wanted to be a physicist, but ended up being a mailman -- and lost his mind."

The book begins with the mythic origin of the Finger Lakes -- "never mind, for now, the implications of a seven-fingered God" -- and Lennon's protagonist hates Nestor, its colorful citizens and the annual "Nestorfest."

Lennon is the author of seven books of fiction, including "The Funnies," "The Light of Falling Stars" and his most recent novel, "Castle," the story of a man who moves to upstate New York and discovers a castle on his land. Lennon also is a photographer and musician, recording as The Inverse Room. He maintains the Writers at Cornell blog, in addition to Ward Six, a literary blog with his wife, writer Rhian Ellis.

When Lennon and Ellis moved to Ithaca from Missoula, Mont., several years ago, he observed that "everything had been trodden upon," in contrast to the Rocky Mountains.

"There's pretty much no place that no one has ever been," he said. "Every place is thick with history, and that has inspired a lot of my fiction."

The Literary Luncheon series continues Dec. 2 with fiction writer Ernesto Quiñonez, assistant professor of English and a Creative Writing Program graduate faculty member.