A nearly forgotten literary lion in winter, speaking magisterially in a nursing home in New York City while a pair of media players hover around him mysteriously; a frustrated would-be impresario on the fringes of nineteen-fifties popular music; a street-survivor cat whose adventures seem to embody a mysterious metaphor of survival; a buttoned-down engineer and his desperate gamble; these and other characters inhabit a brilliant debut collection of fictional writing.
The author's language is sometimes essay-like, frequently topical, admittedly discursive, and occasionally angry. He avoids formulaic writing in these original works, which transcend genre. Often moving and emotionally nuanced, at other times he speaks in a satirical voice of an unusual degree of viciousness.
Antic humor often contends with teeming tragedy in this collection, which features a novella and stories. An outsider to the status quo, the author's independence of mind strives to reject the narrow focus of the academic or other "tribal" thinker.
Indelible family experiences, an iconoclastic frame of mind-often provoked by the cultural scene and current events-along with plain stubbornness, have allowed the author to write in his independent fashion. His utopian idea is that art and language might conceivably liberate the minds of "the people who walk in darkness." With this first ever collection, he wishes to cease being "a voice howling in the wilderness."
