Literary Work

One sweltering night, in a neighborhood on the cusp of change, boy meets girl. If they’d only gone home together, they might still be alive.

The core of this gritty, only in New York-story was inspired by real events – a beautiful, aspiring dancer slain, her corpse dismembered, possibly fed to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. The psychotic roommate has confessed, but a dilettante actor turned journalist thinks there’s more to it and investigates. Soon one of his sources mentions he might have better luck gaining trust if he’d shoot dope.

Welcome to New York’s East Village, aka Loisaida, circa 1988. Meet your neighbors — artists, dreamers, hustlers, devil worshipers, anarchists, junkies and yuppies — all competing for breathing space in a city without air. It’s the era of greed, when the poor are objects of scorn not sympathy, and the gentrifiers view themselves as urban pioneers. This is a story about sex and drugs and real estate. This is a story about a murder…

Like Last Exit to Brooklyn and Bonfire of the Vanities, Loisaida is told through multiple POVs woven together by the mystery surrounding a brutal crime and one man’s pursuit of what he believes will be the story of a lifetime.

Cover by Bradley Wind.

Loisaida is now  at The Kindle Store and will soon be at B&N.com,  Sony E-books, I-Bookstore, and more.  But you don’t have to wait!  It’s available in ALL e-book formats NOW at Smashwords at the promotional price of $1.50 through 7/31!  So whadya waiting for?  Go look at a sample.  And for everyone who still loves the feel of a “real” book, the paperback will be out soon via Caradeloca Press. Stay tuned for more details.
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Novella: The Death Trip
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Here’s a link to me telling a story on the youtube:

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Newsflash:  I finally made the short-list!  Honorable mention on my novella, Hungry Ghosts, in the  32nd annual International 3-Day Novel contest

I’m revising it, trying to get it to full length and to read like it took me longer than 72 hours to write.  Thanks again to Bradley Wind for the great cover.

Here’s a quick pitch:

An unnamed narrator, a ghost, lingers in the New York apartment in which she’s been murdered.  A young couple moves in.  She watches their every move and learns the secrets they keep from each other….

The Lovely Bones for grown ups or maybe Lolita as told by Dolores Haze from the afterlife.

Sneak peak of the first page:

This wakefulness I take as both a sign of God’s existence and of his indifference. Perhaps a punishment, though calling it hell would be melodramatic. Having been raised by rational people who accepted physical laws, I grew up believing that when the brain dies, so would consciousness, yet I am in the Cartesian sense, though I have not been corporeal for sometime.

Just how long, I couldn’t tell you exactly. Years? Though perhaps not many. I doubt more than one or two. Details are elusive. I lose much of what I was every day, yet something remains. In the beginning, I’d try to glimpse your newspapers. The letters were clear, clearer than I’d ever seen them having been farsighted my entire life. But it was like trying to make out hieroglyphics. I could name those letters if I concentrated, but I couldn’t string them together in any coherent way. Reading was gone.

If I had it to do all over, I would have studied the actual forty-nine steps instead of wasting time on Pynchon’s crying lot and the thirty-nine of Hitchcock. I would have read everything that could have given me a hint about how to proceed. But I wasn’t expecting this, and mostly what I have to go on is the memory of literature both high and low – the best guesses of Henry James, Charles Dickens, Stephen King, along with some movies and “very special episodes” of certain TV shows.

I think often of Dickens. Marley’s ghost in particular rattling his chains. At least Scrooge could hear him even if he could dismiss him as an undigested piece of meat. I wonder sometimes what chains I may have forged in life and whether or not they are unlinkable. But mostly, I just watch.

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Short Stories:
My only legitimately published short-story “Pogo” appeared in the The Quarterly (yes, the one edited by Gordon Lish) Spring 1989.  I don’t have an electronic copy, but may scan it and put it up soon.
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Link to podcast of me telling a story on the radio.

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Plenty of else to read on the blog.  Check out the “true stories” category.