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I’ve made several of my previously published essays and short stories available for purchase and download from Smashwords.com.   Previews of each of my mini-eBooks are available so you can decide if the story works for you before spending your money.

Smashwords publishes eBooks in a variety of formats that will support just about any reading software and device, from the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook to good old PDF for your PC or Mac. If my words don’t strike your fancy, browse around the Smashwords site and you might find something you like from another author.  If you find something you like, buy it. The digital format will help save a few trees, a lucky author can buy himself or herself a cup of coffee, and the low prices will save you some money.

It’s a simple exchange of values. You give them money, they give you an eBook.

After the Fire

My memoir about a writing workshop and the teacher whose lessons on the art of fiction and the art of living continue to teach and inspire me, thirty years later.  There’s some back-story about how this essay came to be written in my post eBook Week, Meta-Memoir.

After the Fire: A Personal Essay, Smashwords Edition.  Enter coupon code BT55V to receive a %100 discount. (Free!)

Coming soon…

Bonnifer

A short story about a married office worker struggling with temptation and desire while flirting with an older woman on a sultry summer evening in Greenwich Village.

Coming soon…

The Couple

A young couple, on their last spring break, face an uncertain future.  Family expectations, career choices, and their own uncertainties are driving them apart.  In my blog post “Doomed Couples”, I wrote that every writer has a version of this story.  This is mine.

When Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was published in 1984, it took the publishing world by storm and ushered in a new era of edgy young writers.  Bright Lights, Big City chronicles the emotional, psychological, and spiritual downward spiral of a young would-be writer in the fast-lane of the mid 1980’s Manhattan club scene.  His wife has left him, his job oppresses him, and he lives in a cocaine-addled twilight zone.  The first chapter, entitled “It’s 6 AM, Do You Know Where You Are?” begins:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.  All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again, it might not.  A small voice in side you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.

Confessional stories about people on the descent, whether into madness, depression, dissipation, alcoholism, or any other form of self-destruction are a genre unto themselves that was not invented by McInerney.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells us about his own drive toward that cliff he hopes to protect all the children. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood descends into suicidal depression.  In John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, Ben Sanderson literally drinks himself to death.

What makes McInerney’s novel so unique both then and now is that it is entirely written in second person.  “You,” the reader, are character in the story.  It is a testament to McInerney’s talent that he wrote a whole book in this unusual still and managed to pull it off.  I am as amazed by it now as I was when I first read it.

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“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy– they smashed up things and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

These words of F. Scott Fitzgerald from The Great Gatsby, are the ultimate judgment of the beautiful and  rich by Nick Carraway, and presumably Fitzgerald himself.  Today’s bankers, stock traders, car company executives, and hedge fund managers prove that nothing much has changed.  Gene Mirabelli at Critical Pages offers this brief profile of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Crack-Up (Reissue)

Edmund Wilson (Editor). New Directions 2009, Paperback, 352 pages, $9.39

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner 1999, Paperback, 180 pages, $6.43

Last week when I was at the Baltimore Book Festival browsing through the titles at Daedelus Books’ tent, I came across new copy of an old favorite book about writing, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. I still have my original copy, purchased in the early eighties.  It’s showing its age.  It’s in the mass-market paperback format that was common to that era, inexpensively bound pages of paper that is clearly not acid-free.  The pages are yellow and crumbling.  My new copy is of a more recent printing in a sturdier trade format, and the paper is hopefully less susceptible to entropy.

American novelist John Gardner (not to be confused with the British author of thrillers by the same name) is probably best known for his novels Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, and October Light, a story about a family and a rural community in Vermont, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1976. He died at age 49 in 1982 in a motorcycle crash.

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In 1960, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award.  The title story of the collection is a novella that tells of the doomed romance between Neil Klugman, a recent class college graduate who works in a library and lives in a working class neighborhood in Newark, and Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliff student from an affluent family.  The differences in class, family pressures and the two young lovers slowly forming adult identities cause the relationship to fall apart.  It was one of the first books that formed what I call “The Twenty-Something Genre.”

Seven years later, Mike Nichols turned Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate into a blockbuster movie starring a very young Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, a young college graduate who is seduced and corrupted by the wife of his father’s law partner, the infamous Mrs. Robinson, played deliciously by Anne Bancroft.  The film captures 1960’s affluent society’s shallowness, best summed up in this memorable exchange:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

What one word might a contemporary Mr. McGuire whisper to Benjamin? “Derivatives”?

In the end, Ben finds redemption in the love of Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter and in the final scene we see them escaping on a city bus.  They may be free, but their future is still uncertain as revealed by the uncomfortable expressions on their faces.  As much as we want them to, I can’t actually picture them staying together.

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I have always been envious of writers who are able to effectively render the natural world.  I grew up in the city so in some sense, nature is a foreign land to me.  It is, however, a foreign land in which I have traveled.  As a boy, I was a member of Boy Scout Troop 17 in Elmhurst, Queens.  There were camping trips every month throughout the year, two weeks of summer camp in July, and a special “long trip” in August where each year we went on an extended cross-country road trip.  In August of 1972, I hiked Mount Washington in New Hampshire, navigated the rapids of the Penobscot River in Maine, hiked along the rocky shores in Acadia National Park, and did traditional New England style Cod fishing in Nova Scotia (making Captains Courageous, a very enjoyable read in school the following fall). 1973 was a grand tour of the west including a backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon, mountain climbing in The Grand Tetons, and canoeing in Missouri.  1974 was a trip to Arkansas for a multi-day canoeing the beautiful Buffalo River.  Years later when the Clinton Whitewater scandal erupted, I actually knew where the place was.

These experiences stimulated all my city-boy senses senses and whenever I read a piece of writing that effectively captures them, I am transported back to those places in my memory.  Some of these places have shown up in my writing.  My young couple in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” spend a night camping in Acadia National Park. Another couple hike up to Indian Cliffs in Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camp, near Narrowsburg, New York in my story “Indian Summer.”  How I end up mixing fictional couples with boy scout memories in stories with romantic themes is perhaps a topic for psycho-analysis.  As my late father might have said, “Boy Scout camp was never like this!”

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