New Gold City

Trying to Care , a collection of six short stories about love, family, confusion, parenting and mid-life romance, has just been published at Amazon.com's Kindle Book Store. These stories are not intended to provide answers to the reader. They are intended to give perspective and strange insight into love in these post-modern times. "I Could Pity You" starts the collection off with a wife trying to get her husband to quit smoking when she tells him it makes her want to pity him. In "Millie Floating," a husband waking up one snowy morning is convinced his wife has murdered the family dog.  "Jenna's Mother"finds a daughter troubled by her mother's late life situation living in Section 8 senior housing. Jenna Tambore feels uncomfortable in the building and confused about how to help her mom.  In "House Sitting," a husband struggles to understand why it is he and his wife are always fighting. He gets his answer taking care of the neighbors...

Today, February 21, 2012, would have been David Foster Wallace's 50th birthday. We could have started thinking of him as a gray beard in the American literary canon. Instead, he will be forever young (see my 2008 farewell to him here ). Wallace is kind of the Dostoevsky of the modern American era. While old Fyodor was consumed by the idea of suffering as the means to human redemption, Wallace was consumed by the poetry of loneliness that our consumer culture tries valiantly to defeat.  Both men came at their worlds with full-throttle intellects, but the voices they chose often tended to be strangely childish or buffoonish, and either heroically unselfconscious or tragically confused and far too self-conscious.  Dostoevsky's world was always one of transitional ideas and moral questioning. Wallace's was one of transitional consumerism and the drunken hype of media think.  I think of the two in the same basket most because more than any other writers I know of, as a reader ...

I've published two stories to the Kindle site at Amazon.com in the past week. They can both be found at the following Kindle links: What Goes Inside Her Miniature What Goes Inside is currently listed as #57 on the list of free literary fiction offerings. Her Miniature is listed as #77. I'm hoping folks will download both as much as possible today and tomorrow while they're free. However, if you really want to make my day, wait until Monday and download them for the Amazon price of $2.99. Let me know if they're worth it, too. I admit that these stories are quite provocative and a bit nasty and even nihilistic. They are part of a larger manuscript, all dealing with the love thing as it affects those of us heading into middle age. Julia Davenport is an amplification of a lot of stuff I'm reading and hearing about these days. Many women are as full of wanderlust as men. Some of the stories I've heard over the past 6-8 years are quite interesting--and heartbreakin...

A creepy, rather sordid, somewhat kinky story, HER MINIATURE, will be posted at Kindle Select by tomorrow morning. Julia Davenport has a pretty strong effect on people -- especially men.  These stories have been influenced by the struggles so many of us in our 40s and 50s have with love, sex, romance, fidelity and adultery. It's almost as if heading into our middle age years we can't help ourselves and just jump right at the most intense and personal aspects of who we are. Is enlightenment possible if you're fantasizing about an affair or spending your time going crazy in one? Possibly. Maybe the enlightenment you achieve comes from learning your lesson one way or another... I worry most about all of us Boomers as we head towards our final twenty years, but I worry as well about the next generations coming up. No one talks enough about how crazy (and adolescent) the 40s and 50s can be. The intensely personal is still the most interesting aspect of life. And the least unde...

I just published my first offering at Amazon's Kindle site. It's just a short story, but it's a start. If you're interested, go check it out here . The cover I posted last night sucked. Sorry. I posted a new one today (see image to left) and hopefully Amazon will have that up by tomorrow morning. Yes, it's one short story and the price is $2.99. I know you can get free stories and I know you can get stuff as low as $0.99, however, this is a good story. It's about a guy who is happily married, just going about his life, when one day he becomes completely smitten by a woman named Julia Davenport. This is the first in a series of interconnected stories about Ms. Davenport and how in our middle age we all get confused.  Until people tell me I'm full of it and they're not getting their money's worth, $2.99 is the price. I promise you, right now I'm not getting rich on this. For what it's worth, I've asked to run a promotional offering of a fre...