Novels

Benjamin Hackett -- frightening, fascinating, dangerous, lovable, a twenty-three-year-old living on the edge of madness -- explores the most remote corners of his mind. In his room at the boarding house, Benjamin works on, "Benjamin's Mysteries," in which he pours out his deepest anxieties as well as medieval fantasies of great beauty. He becomes enmeshed in a novel called "Glicken On, Baby, It's Now" -- a futuristic fantasy about Lex Baker, a super-hero of the 22nd century assigned to save the world from Operation Suffocate, an evil plot to pump noxiousness into the controlled atmosphere of the "megopolis." The language of the future twists rhythms into new meanings. Lex Baker's sexual exploits, his gratuitous violence, his surreal preoccupations, all strike a great response in Benjamin. When he meets Reeva, the author of "Glicken," fiction moves into his life in astonishing ways. The tensions and reverberations of Lex and Benjamin and Reeva smash Benjamin into new dimensions. Reeling, Benjamin takes up the study of the brain, staying on course for the final shocking ending.

AN AMERICAN FABLE is about ambition, luck, and death. Set in New York in the early 1950’s -- post World War II and just before color television -- the story follows Aris Bellerophon, a boy who loves horses and who claims a gypsy told him he’d be famous at twenty-five, and Big Brim Oscar Birmingham, a famous radio personality who’s charming, erratic, overweight, and childless after many years of marriage.

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​Each character in this story wants magic and passion. But the people in AN AMERICAN FABLE make very different choices and, because their lives are powerfully intertwined, their choices intensely affect each other and change each of them forever.

Haunted by his near-death experience in a violent car crash, Max Star is being hunted by people he doesn't know. Believing religions cause war even though God is good, Max drops out of graduate school and struggles to bring his new Compassionate Judaism movement to as many people as possible. But Max's faith in love, not ideology, threatens some of the religious Orthodox in New York and Israel.

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BLOOD NEVER DRIES races toward the climactic evening rally as Max attempts to understand the parts of his life which brought him to this confrontation. But with his enemies coming closer, he and his wife and his family become more and more unnerved. Max is desperate to understand the consequences of his dreams but most of all, he must discover who wants him stopped.