the brother k

The Sixers beat Boston, and then minutes later I learn that an Australian gentleman named Robert Tulip, a guy I don't know, gives The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity five stars on amazon and compares my writing to Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Well, no one could ever live up to that, but by strange coincidence, the protag had plenty of buds but was short on paper, so it was mass market pages of The Brothers Karamazov that fictional John and Jake were smoking in the expurgated scenes.

Mr. Tulip wrote:

Wow, what a superb ten thousand words. I'm not sure if it just because I am reading The Brothers Karamazov at the moment, but this short story reminds me so much of Dostoyevksy in its biting social satire, its acute political insight, its ability to paint pictures in words, and its foreboding of a society that has lost its way and is on a trajectory to catastrophe. The drugs are the anaesthetic for the emotional pain of a fascistic existence in denial, enabling a crazy-brave creative prophetic vision. The description of undergraduate life is realistic if exaggerrated [sic] in a hallucinatory direction for effect, and casts a lens upon wider social trends.

Thank you, Robert. And Isaac Sweeney. And Christina at The Strand. And Kate Ledger, author of Remedies. And new acquaintance Don Ray Pollock, from Knockemstiff, Ohio. And Dan Cafaro especially. All of you brought me some good book vibrations this week and made me feel like the impossible was possible if not right around the bend.

PS--Betrayal is available for free through March 12 at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/40939