Kirjahaku

Penelope Variations is a 76,000-word short story collection about alcoholism and mental illness. The narrator, Charlie, links the stories, many of which are about botched relationships that serve as points along the map of his dysfunction. The stories take you through his drinking years, and his attempts at sobriety. The book doesn't tell an entirely hopeful story, with Charlie, in the end, finding sobriety but also a hard-nosed fatalism, where he submits to life even when it seems hopeless.

Prick is my first book, started for National Novel Writing Month, finished later. To be quite honest, it is a sort of low brow piece of meta-fiction, as in the subject or topic of the book is the book's writing, and the book is simply my day to day: written often in the food court of a dying mall where silver haired people ate cheeseburgers with glazed over eyes; typed late into the night after getting home late from work, after a day of literary theory and cleaning up junk at the behest of managers with hooves just so Santa and his unholy denizens of hell will return to help our year end sales; written at a time when I really didn't have any friends, just one self-professed "degenerate" drinking whiskey while I drank iced tea; written over the years where I would feel compelled by women, but my past, my diagnosis, my economic status, and my morbid introversion just left me tongue tied with my wishes, my longings in mute chaos, as I would pepper my book with descriptions of porn scenes.

Goldfish is a hard novella to sum up. Following my failure to complete 50k in one November in 2011, I succeeded by allowing myself to write ad hoc, create a collage, and wax poetical across every page. Though you will find merely a sober, chain smoking mind in a world where nobody has a name, but me, J.R.; as I wrote in Starbucks in Wellington Circle the details of a book that is about the train ride to the Wellington Circle Starbucks and the ensuing work night, to write the book itself: sketched on the train ride home, a shit show, you know; to try to ennoble such a life, to and fro, back and forth, nothing but dreams and coffee and dream smoke trailing as I drifted wraithlike up the stairs realizing of course as told by a somnambulist who visits me purple lidded once more a Goldfish flying solo peering through the funhouse g/ass at the world outside develops a soul of ice snot to be glared at by normal people with bugged out eyes.

Mood poems, loneliness poems, longing for a full time job poems, mall poems, bus poems, sweet ass girl sailing by on my way to the train station poems, poems about depression, lonely living, idealizing fantasies, writing phantasms.

The Girl Who Was Sorrow's Friend was written in 2014 (I think) and a friend helped me edit it. It was quite a mess, and I had a hard time in the aftermath of writing it deciding what to make of it. I was exploring stream of consciousness writing, and it was my first foray into fiction, somewhat, though I found myself jumping into the narrative, breaking the fourth wall. The book centers on a young woman named Sid, who we find at loose ends and feeling disconnected from friends, remembering the only man she ever loved who died before her dark eyes after saving her from OD'ing, twice; and her mother's death, a suicide; her father's illness, leaving him catatonic; and finding herself unemployed with no direction, a dark seed is planted in her otherwise strong spirit.

A second volume of collected poems written in the years after This One is For the Nobodies. Just freeverse poetry sort of about life and such. Musings of a mental case.

Based on Ziegler's revised text, this book provides a commentary on Plutarch's "Life of Alexander". It devotes most of its space to historical matters, comparing Plutarch's narrative at every point with the sources. In addition, it adds a fresh introduction and select bibliographies on Plutarch and on Alexander himself.