Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the truth prevail. And while you're at it, read a good book!

Preferably one of mine.

Yes, it’s ugly out there, and the odds are very good that it’s going to get uglier. I can’t offer solutions, but I can offer escape, with books for almost every taste, whether you’re into political satire, academic satire, sci-fi, fantasy, pastiches of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe, criticism, and even outright “literature”. One of them is even free, and the rest can easily be purchased via Amazon. Just click on the link and enjoy!

Tongue of Newt 

What do you do if you’re a young kid trying to make it from Sandusky, Ohio to the bright lights in Washington, DC circa 2008 when Newt Gingrich—yes, that Newt Gingrich—commissions you to write his magnum opus, The City and its Masters, a Washington novel intended to blow the lid off the Baghdad of the Potomac? If you’re Jerry Callahan, you take the job, fending off your backstabbing peers, and enraged boss, in Newt’s campaign committee, struggling to keep your head above the tide that leads to fortune and escape the miseries of the shallows.

Tongue of Newt is a novel of political satire, containing many real people as characters, who do and say things that, in all likelihood, they would not do or say in real life. I even go so far as to add a few years to the life of David Brinkley, who unfortunately died in 2003, five years before the events in this book take place. I got it into my mind that I wanted David in my book, and the fact that he wasn’t around in 2008 struck me as irrelevant.

Despite these stretchers, as one of my forebears put it, this book is not, I think, a novel of simple caricature. The Newt Gingrich of these pages, to my mind, at least, is more likeable than the real one—a sort of crazy uncle rather than the bloviating, back-stabbing, self-promoting K Street gargoyle of today’s front pages. I hope I will not give away the ending by saying that there is no horrible revelation at the end of my book—Newt does not take bribes, cheat on his wife, commit murder, or get a 13-year-old black girl pregnant. He may be fantastic, but he is not sordid. In any event, it is not really his book, but that of Jerry Callahan’s.

Traveling North: The Education of Alice Barnstable 

Alice Barnstable, a not so simple girl traveling from Valdosta, Georgia, to Washington, DC, finds herself first mixed up in the fast-paced world of political consulting and then toting a gun for the CIA. Alice will tell you her own story, in a bildungsroman that takes readers back to the tumultuous Reagan Era, where Alice encounters everyone from CIA Director Bill Casey to Woody Allen. Most of all, she encounters her boss, Kevin Meister, a German longing to atone for his country’s Nazi past by striving to bring the benefits of democracy to Central and Eastern Europe.

I Am Jill’s Hyman

New Jersey Jews in Alabama? It happens! It happened to Hyman Bookbinder, an ABD in linguistics who throws away the academic life to teach kids to read way down South in football-crazed Auburn University. Complications ensue.

More than along for the ride are Hyman’s wife Rachel, who has her doctorate in social research, and Hyman’s new boss, Lester Gomez, in Hyman’s eyes a charismatic near genius summoning up the resources of both modern linguistics and modern computer technology to teach kids to read. And of course there’s also Jill, who tells Hyman “You Jews sure have funny names.”

Vorak of Kolnap 

A World of Mung: That’s what they called Kolnap, a sorry sack of methane mush, the least glorious posting in the entire Nardan Confederation, a good thirty years’ freeze from the nearest “civilized” planet. Careers were lost on Kolnap, not made, until one cockroach had the courage to make a difference, had the abdomen to stand up and join claws across the species, daring the embrace of the temptress grasshopper Nayluu and building an alliance with his ant sergeant, Orkan. Together they rewrote the history of Kolnap, a history forged in the soul of the roach of roaches, the roach they called “Vorak of Kolnap”.

Brief Lives

Brief Lives is a collection of 32 short stories that I wrote over the past thirty years. Some date from the early eighties. Most were done in the nineties but there are a few oughties mixed in as well. The stories range in length from brief sketches to full-length tales, while the tone varies from trivial to farcical to tragic. Only eight have appeared in print before.

Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike

Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike contains two short stories and a novella, with famous authors as the leading characters. In “The Transfiguration of W. H. Auden,” the great poet dies and goes, not to heaven, but someplace better. Victorian England! In “The Man Who Met Joyce Carol Oates,” an admirer discovers that encountering genius is not without peril. In “The Apotheosis of John Updike,” the poet of suburbia encounters catharses without number west of the Hudson.

Alternative Worlds Elvis and Others

Many scientists have advanced the concept of a “multiverse”, a near-infinite number of alternative realities that co-exist with our own, yet can never be observed. If this theory is true, then there are perforce a near-infinite number of Elvis Presleys, some differing only slightly from our own King, but others remarkably distinct. Alternative Worlds Elvis and Others examines a handful of such universes and also ventures into several Elvis-free realities, for example a world in which Surgeon General Ralph Nader hawks tobacco, and another in which our own Earth shrinks so violently that all land masses slide below the sea, with only a single island remaining, the isle of Manhattan. 

James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide

Full appreciation has never been given to the genius of James Thurber, one of America’s most acclaimed humorists and a shaping force of the New Yorker in its first decades. James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide provides a thorough review of Thurber’s work, giving special consideration to Thurber’s “serious” articles and stories, which run the gamut from touching to nightmarish. I’ve also included a short collection of essays on Thurber’s fellow New Yorker writers E. B. White and Wolcott Gibbs and several more on the subject perhaps dearest to Thurber’s heart, words. A full index is included as well.

Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra

Sherlock Holmes meets, well, the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Complications ensue. Available in hardcover and paperback, new and used According to the Chicago Sun-Times, it’s a “rollicking adventure story … that puts a superb spin on the intellectual by-play between Watson and Holmes … Splendidly written homage,” and I heartily agree.

Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara

Sherlock Holmes has a new client—Winston Churchill! Holmes and Watson ride the Orient Express to Istanbul in search of a fabulous diamond. Also excellent. Available in hardcover and paperback, new and used. Also available from Blackstone/Downpour in an excellent, full-length audio version, read by the noted British actor Simon Vance.

Three Bullets

These are three new Nero Wolfe novellas I have written, recreating Rex Stout’s famous fat detective. The first, Invitation to a Shooting Party, is a period piece, set in 1935, while the other two, Fame Will Tell and Politics Is Murder, are set in the present day, circa 2005. Three Bullets can be downloaded free for Apple or Kindle devices or for desktop by clicking the link and scrolling down (or reading) to the bottom of the excerpt and clicking the links provided.