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Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body

Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a Life Helmet, arguing with another cat head about whether their ship had a name, and realizing that the argument was funnier and sadder and more philosophically loaded than anything I had planned for it to be. That was twenty-eight episodes ago. The episodes lived on the Human Meme podcast as a serialized audio drama called Cat Heads in Space, and for years, that was where the story existed: in the air, in the performance, in the space between my microphone and the listener’s ear. Today, the story has a body. Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem is now available from David Boles Books as a novel.

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem book cover

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Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years

Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate across decades, assembling themselves in the background of a life, borrowing material from every stage and every failure and every standing ovation until the writer finally sits down and discovers that the book has already been written in the margins of everything else. Beautiful Numbness: Art, Sedation, and Twenty-Five Centuries of the Standing Ovation is that kind of book. It was conceived when I was ten years old. It has taken me more than half a century to deliver it. It is now available as a Kindle ebook, a paperback, and a free PDF download from David Boles Books.

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The Metropolitan Opera is Dying Because It Wants to Die

The pinnacle of the Performing Arts in America is collapsing not from the weight of its chandelier, but from the brittleness of its imagination. The Metropolitan Opera has chosen extinction over evolution, and the evidence is no longer circumstantial.

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The Last Living American White Male: A Novel of Obsolescence and Love

The title may make you uncomfortable. That was the point. For the past year, I have been living inside a grey city that exists only in my imagination, spending my days with a garbage man named Robert James Miller and an administrative processing unit named Alma. Today, their story is finally available to readers. The Last Living American White Male is now published as both a Kindle ebook and a paperback through David Boles Books. This is not the book I expected to write. I had other projects in the queue, other obligations stacking up on the desk. But Robert and Alma would not leave me alone. They kept appearing in the margins of my notes, in the half-awake hours before dawn, in the silence between other sentences. Some characters arrive politely and wait their turn. These two broke down the door.

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Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

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