Kirjahaku

Essays, short stories, and news analysis on banks, politics, train rides, grade school, and other issues. These essays were written during the two years leading up to the election of Barack Obama. A number of them were published on the Huffington Post, an online newspaper. The short stories were inspiration for the making of two short film scripts, of which one was produced. Essays: * Grade School: Learn How to Bullshit Expertly to Secure Your Productive Place in Society * How to Fix the Economy: Get Out of Iraq * Bleeding Heart Conservatives: Why McCain is Unfit for Office * Bank Runs, Federal Seizure, Mortgage Meltdown? This is America? * This Depression Won't Be So bad... * The Evil that Banks Do * ...and others

From the award-winning author of Denial comes a novel about a New Age writer whose life is irrevocably changed when a devastating climate disaster forces him to confront his belief in the existence of God. What if God spoke to you? Would you hear Him? Would you obey His command? Arthur Zinn, an author of high-end spiritual texts, has fallen in love with a librarian married to a newfound close friend. When an environmental disaster threatens her life, Arthur's frantic prayers lead to a mystifying event that challenges his assumptions about the nature of the universe and the divine. In God and Sex, Oregon Book Award winner and acclaimed screenwriter Jon Raymond masterfully entwines themes of ecology, mortality, art, faith, and the tangled complexities of carnal love.

A futuristic thriller about climate change by the acclaimed screenwriter of First Cow, Meek's Cutoff, and HBO's Mildred Pierce. The year is 2052. Climate change has had a predictably devastating effect: Venice submerged, cyclones in Oklahoma, megafires in South America. Yet it could be much worse. Two decades earlier, the global protest movement known as the Upheavals helped break the planet's fossil fuel dependency, and the subsequent Nuremberg-like Toronto Trials convicted the most powerful oil executives and lobbyists for crimes against the environment. Not all of them. A few executives escaped arrest and went into hiding, including pipeline mastermind Robert Cave. Now, a Pacific Northwest journalist named Jack Henry who works for a struggling media company has received a tip that Cave is living in Mexico. Hoping the story will save his job, he travels south and, using a fake identity, makes contact with the fugitive. The two men strike up an unexpected friendship, leaving Jack torn about exposing Cave--an uncertainty further compounded by the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and a new romance with an old acquaintance. Who will really benefit from the unmasking? What is the nature of justice and punishment? How does one contend with mortality when the planet itself is dying? Denial is both a page-turning speculative suspense novel and a powerful existential inquisition about the perilous moment in which we currently live.