I write realistic fiction about men and women. Their relationships are the plot, but their characters are the story. All of these (and more) create what's otherwise called The Traditional Novel. These stories are long reads; sometimes they are dark stories. They are always sophisticated fiction inside complicated stories. This is ... fiction that stirs your imagination, your prejudices, your passion for the opposite sex.
MAX, THE BLIND GUY (2015)
This is the story of Maximilian and Greta Ruth, their 40-year relationship, and all the demons that show up as they find that life rarely goes according to plan.Max daydreams in colors which his eyes can no longer see. His wife is leading them on a six-city European tour. Greta Ruth calls this trip their “last hurrah.” She hasn't had the best from 40 years with Max. But Max takes their life differently: marriage is an affair of more than the heart’s journey. This pair of American originals have known passion, riches, and sorrow. Today, these roads lead them through Europe’s famed cities, but Greta wonders if the plan will see her through to the promised “champagne on the Grand Canal.”
Their Elite Travel tour-mates are getting on each other’s nerves. They are characters found next door, on everyday streets, under black-eye days, and across lost-memory nights. The highlights and sights, the posh lunches, the gamy conversation over drinks in the bar – and of course the "tour friendships" – all make their faux-camaraderie sometimes combative but never boring. A story rife with modern perils – too much time, too much money, just enough libido, secrets revealed – Max and Greta Ruth don’t wait for what the future may bring.
Oft times a dark, anti-romance, Max, the blind guy is also the story of choices a husband and wife make, which, apart from their ardor and honor, erode trust but leave the fibers that do not allow them to pull away so easily; they must therefore feel their way toward some shared middle-ground.
Read an excerpt of Max, the blind guy not found at on-line shops.
WHAT BEAUTY (2012)
Buy the story of this sculptor's work-life at Amazon.
Read an excerpt of What Beauty not found at on-line shops.
THE VILLAGE WIT (2010)
Also available as the best fiction from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Read an excerpt of The Village Wit not found at on-line shops.
THE JANITOR: Or, DOSTOEVSKY IN AMERICAANITOR: Or, DOSTOEVSKY IN AMERICA (2020)
Have you ever heard the story of the Hero turned Goat?
At sixteen, Ernest Waine is trapped in a world of hate. He cycles between knowing his friends and seeing enemies watching from the shadows. What has made me this way? he asks. An answer eludes him by day; at night he reads fantastic books in which he can only hope to learn some right path along the potholed roads leading to the end of the twentieth century.
The day Ernest opens Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s voice shouts at him over the noise made constant by his daytime life. What he hears from the Russian master-storyteller makes the case for his next move. Murder, on a notorious scale.
Twenty-five years later, Ernest is asked to recall the day in his life when he had planned to kill his classmates. This time he does not hear Dostoevsky speaking, but his own voice coming from behind the horror of what he had done, and what he hadn’t.
The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America carries with it the passions of the frightened, the angry: those children compelled to react in the name of self-defined safety, and lone survival. Sometimes, the sum of all actions does not define a life.
“Let me tell you the one about the Goat turned Hero...”
This story of a high-school shooting gone wrong is for sale at GoogleBooks.
Read this dark story by buying from KOBO Digital Books.