The Strange Recital

"Men see what they need to in times of war. But what men claimed to have seen during the Great War defied imagination." That's just the beginning of a strange journey into magic and history in the mysterious, old-time Catskills. Do dark fairies haunt our woods?

"I spent the final decade of the twentieth century wandering. Tolkein whispered in my ear: 'Not all who wander are lost.' Ha. Some are."

A hitchhiker encounters something inexplicable in an average American town. What makes an artist? Can something be both real and impossible?

"Do I mythologize Lincoln? Certainly. But he was mythic. Abraham led the nation into a vast fratricidal war—a Greek myth multiplied by 500,000. He spent most of his Presidency wondering why the gods had cursed him, like Oedipus."

A chiropractor thinking about a President... why not? Past and present mingle in a man's journal. Is this a novel or something else?

"Outside in the street, it was cold and damp. The fine wind-driven rain needled her exposed flesh. It was a foul day but it didn't bother her, as she was alive with inspiration...."

Art and dreams in surrealist Paris. Journeying to the deep interior can be dangerous. Will she return?

"As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples."

A pastoral paradise... but is there something dark under the surface? Troubles in America manifest in the personal. Let Hamlet tell you about it.

"I hope you've not taken cold with the doors open, Doctor. The wind was blowing harsh on the heath. I'd forgotten how mortally cold wind can make you."

A riveting dialogue between the dying Sigmund Freud and a blind prophet from ancient Greece, a key player in the drama of Oedipus. What happened, and what does it mean?

"It was Christmas '37 when the ship docked at Piraeus and disgorged me and my trunk onto the quay of the commercial harbor.... I was now just like the immigrants you'd sometimes see on Ellis Island, back in my own country."

An injured detective flees New York to land in Athens at the dawn of war. He'll face desolation, oppression, music, magic.... Sample the first English translation of an acclaimed Greek novel, plus an author interview.

"In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife."

An odd little character piece about the inexplicability of human behavior... was this long-dead author ahead of his time?

"By the time the next tsunami hit, at dawn, Father Flanagan's main concern was for the nuns. Their children's mission, on another island miles away, was at risk."

A moral dilemma on which hangs the fate of humanity... what would you do?

"I was sitting on the ground, straight up against something rigid, my head was hanging, my chin on my chest. I smelled smoke and heard the snap and hiss of a fire."

A woman wakes up, struggling to remember... was she once free? How do you face a future in captivity? A novel set in the past but timely for the present.