J. R. Hamilton

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.

Suicide Poetry is a short novel exploring the dark side, the tragic side, of desperately passionate people with vices in a bankrupt city in a country selling sanitized love and hustling their own people for money; like Atlantic City-- the money never hits the streets; the wheel never really stops turning; and even once you've won, you'll have to spin again. Jake, like a small percentage of late adolescents or new adults, finds himself acting rather strangely, under pressure and new stresses, and he breaks, having a psychotic episode and feeling as though he has ruined his reputation, lost the love of his life (young people are stupid), and find himself with no friends to speak of or to. He finds himself taking the last of his money and escaping, right into a desperate love with a woman leading a drinking life struggling to keep herself together in Atlantic City.

Elucidates the legendary general's military campaigns and political ideas in light of his Macedonian heredity and background