Chinese Gucci

Chinese Gucci by Hosho McCreesh arrives today.

Please direct all media inquiries to Ben Tanzer.

#GivingTuesday

I hope everyone reading this is in a position to give to others this holiday season although it's very understandable if that is not the case. Thankfully, I'm not about to ask for money, but if you could give a moment of your time and add a rating at Amazon or Goodreads for Fight for Your Long Day, Auggie's Revenge, or any of my published e-singles I'm sincerely grateful. Thank you for reading this and for any help I receive.

the shocking news. . .

• Between 2016 and 2017, people with at least a bachelor's degree were the only group to have an increase in the poverty rate or the number of people in poverty. Among this group, the poverty rate increased 0.3 percentage points and the number in poverty increased by 363,000 individuals between 2016 and 2017. Even with this increase, among educational attainment groups, people with at least a bachelor’s degree had the lowest poverty rates in 2017.

Ricky Jay

Like magic--poof!--he disappeared.

I'm now learning the full extent of his career, but I knew Jay only as an actor from David Mamet films I'd always hope to see again on the big screen. From personal recollection, one of my favorite lines I heard him utter comes from Heist. In an early scene, he is due to drive a getaway car and says to an accomplice in the backseat, "My motherfucker's real cool," in reference to the leader of the gang.

Rest in peace, Ricky Jay. 

Small Business Saturday

Auggie's Revenge and Fight for Your Long Day are available at your local independent bookstore. Thank you and have a nice holiday season!

Among other things in 2018. . .

I'm thankful for five-star ratings of Fight for Your Long Day from people I've never met.

Brian Alan Ellis on the JDO Show

Over at the JDO Show, Brian Alan Ellis recognizes that Philly isn't quite for him while host J. David Osborne sentences Brett Kavanaugh to crimes against porcelain. Good stuff; check it out.

My Father

According to Bukowski's "My Father," the poet never voted, but I have no information on how often his many imitators have gone to the polls.

December 25, 1942

"What has the Socialism of intellectuals ever to do with the people? Think of Edmund Wilson's socialism so humanist, meditative, and the rest--but it is as self-consciously personal as Flaubert's hatred of socialism; both artists merely talk about their particular vision of the world and their horror of it."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, entry from December 25, 1942

September 9, 1942

"They are killing us off in Europe; they are killing us off by the thousands from the Rhine to the Volga. The blood of the Jews is like the vapor in air that Faustus saw when the Devil claimed his due; but no one claims us but death; our due is, apparently, the 'sympathy' of a few men of good will. From this morning's Times, however, I learn that French Catholic priests have been fighting Vichy's submission to the Nazi Jewish policy. Saliege, the Archbishop of Toulouse, has written this pastoral letter: 'There is a Christian morality, there is a human morality, that impose duties and confer rights. These duties and these rights derive from the very nature of man."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, entry from September 9, 1942