Heresies and Seditions

HERESIES AND SEDITIONS can best be described as intelligent fun. The Latin word satura means both satire and a mixed dish or medley. My book is a salmagundi of insolent satires, wacky improvisations, decarboxylated yarns, imaginary interviews, fugitive visions, crystalline lyrics, mystical runes, rhymes and misdemeanors. . . . It generally avoids the standard narcotizing narrative of popular fiction and should appeal to readers with a sense of humor who aren't afraid of the literature of ideas. The 'heresies' part of the title refers to writings on themes drawn from esoteric religions, especially Gnosticism. The book combines fiction and verse in a rather original way. Prose pieces are followed by poems, which modulate between sections, and there is a structural logic and flow from beginning to end, as in a musical composition. The movement is from sheer farce ('Strange Doings') to parodies of Swift ('Another Modest Proposal'), Stevens ('Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Yuppie') and the King James Bible ('The Book of Mammon') to a caustic critique of the American nightmare ('Mr. K. and the Demons') to the philosophical satires of 'Conversation with an Archon' and 'Mythos.'I write what I have to write and not what I think an editor or niche audience will like. Since some of the topics I deal with are potentially depressing, I have chosen to treat them in a humorous or fanciful way that expresses sobering truths without dispiriting the reader.