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Find affordable Auggie here, here, here, and here.

Best Sellers Rank: #9 in Humorous Literary Fiction

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Tyler Dempsey's Best of the Bests

Award-winning essayist Tyler Dempsey placed "A Day's Worth" (Eclectica Magazine) at the top of his Best of the Bests for 2025.

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“A Separate Piece” Parts IX, X & XI

"That could have been that, as they say. Our lives had crossed again, but they would continue apart. But one day, I returned from work to find a brown package under the awning of the front porch. It looked like a book, although I had not ordered a book. None that I remembered, anyhow. Ripping open the paper exterior, I cut through bubble wrap and found his name on the cover of an azure and beige hardcover. A heavy tomb, an academic press.

"Against the title page, I saw it. Two pages in, an Evan Ferguson. An original doodle in pen and ink. It was a drawing of a phallus hovering near a mouth. A nose shared a likeness with mine. The kisser was open; the tongue was out."

~~ from "A Separate Piece," Parts VIX, X & XI, the fourth and final installment at Citywide Lunch.

"A Separate Piece," Parts VI, VII & VIII

“Fuck you, Evan. Fuck you. You scumbag. Calling thirty years later to get your rocks off on my misery. You’re tenured. You have a big house. A family. Suburban New England. Yeah, I have a wife and kid, but half the time, I’m on the road living in shitholes and extended stays. Contract labor. If it’s long-term substitute, it’s always special ed. Work no one wants, so they hire me. Empty towns where they need another adult in the building. Paycheck-to-paycheck. Gig-to-gig. Depressed. Lonely. Sometimes, I’m scared. And you want more of me now?”

~~ from "A Separate Piece," Parts VI, VII & VIII, the third of four installments at Citywide Lunch.

"A Separate Piece," Parts III, IV, & V

"From then on, Ferguson haunted my thoughts. No matter what daily tasks I attended to, Evan was in the back if not the front of my mind. A cluttered existence, it had always been, but this was worse. Sitting on the back porch after mowing our meager lawn—crabgrass, dandelions, irregular yellowish turf—I found myself remembering Evan’s hints of literary analysis. Although his focus was art and architecture with an emphasis on the ancient Romans and Greeks, he also knew contemporary novels. In fact, he’d introduced me to Gaddis, Barth, Pynchon, and DeLillo. He’d read Ulysses and The Recognitions. Even as an undergrad, Ferguson could evaluate Gaddis and what he said about art, forgery, American life, and so on. I wouldn’t have stumbled down a literary path had he not encouraged me to read good books."

~~ from "A Separate Piece," Parts III, IV, & V, the second of four installments at Citywide Lunch.

"A Separate Piece," I & II

"But Ferguson had the goods. In a racist, if post-racist, America, the toughest gene lines from Dehli, Seoul, Taipei, and Nanjing arrived to match wits with establishment Jews, Southern hemisphere scions, upper-crust Europeans, and others tough enough to survive freedom’s brutality. Evan could compete. I thought of his additional exploits: fucking girls in the library stacks and thesis carousels; offering sex to a reading room full of coeds past midnight during finals week; smoking weed with a circle of clever homosexuals who formed an airtight chamber with both palms while he alone applied his lips directly to the joint. Ferguson had no fear. Unlike yours truly—a mélange of depressed Slovak, Russian serf, Rusyn-Carpathian, and northern Ashkenazim from destitute shtetls—Evan Ferguson was built to last."

~~ from "A Separate Piece," Parts I and II, the first of four installments at Citywide Lunch.

Auggie and others

It's the perfect week to purchase a copy of Auggie's Revenge.

And the Canon Rap Got Played

Read a zany one here or here.

Meniscus

The Australasian Association of Writing Programs' Meniscus published a new issue. A year ago, they published "Chinese Sun." 

Auggie

Auggie's Revenge is available at $2.99 as an e-book.

two for one

I'm excited to announce that this fall, Rick Harsch's Corona\Samizdat Press will publish as one volume the corrected version of Fight for Your Long Day and the sequel to my debut novel. What further adventures await Cyrus Duffleman? Is our adjunct hero even alive?

free shipping

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I wear blue jeans and write about New York City.

"Lastly, a writer dressed in blue jeans and a dress shirt, read from his book Fight for Your Long Day. He said in his introductory comments, “If I want to sell the book, I guess I need to let you know who I am. My name is Alex Kudera.” The audience clapped enthusiastically. His reading described a day in the life of a very tired adjunct in New York City. So much of what he dealt with Heather could relate to: trying not to leave anything behind, rushing in and rushing out of the classroom, the students desperately trying to talk while you are trying to make it to your next gig and don’t have time to listen, the colleagues and chair who say demeaning things to you but are impervious to the way they talk down to you. It felt good to laugh about it instead of the daily grind of dealing with it, day in and day out."

~~ from Adjunct Headquarters, "Subconference of the MLA" by Lydia Field Snow

Saturday Night Substack

I'm not active on Substack, but now I have a post that originated there.

affordable copies available online

At eBay, we found affordable new copies of Auggie's Revenge as well as fine or near fine copies of the first edition of Fight for Your Long Day. Other sellers offer new and used copies of each novel.

Kaufmann Nietzsches

The Kudera Nietzsches

 

used books

 

the American Dream

"For what we get in Fight For Your Long Day is a very much street-level view of Duff’s (and Kudera’s) much beloved and fretted-over hometown of Philadelphia circa 2000-and-something, and while the picture is hardly a pretty one, it is a keenly-felt one for all that. Our man Duff really does worry about the many of its citizens who somehow fall several (or more) rungs below him on the various, supposedly meritocratic, but shyster-led-and-bred ladders of the American Dream."