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Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

Ischia is Burning book cover, topographic map design with crimson title and CLASSIFIED stamp

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The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

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A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

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The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

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Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

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The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

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The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.

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The Great Audio Laundering: How AI Scammers are Highjacking the ACX Premium Market and Defrauding the Human Soul

The digital landscape of 2026 was supposed to be a golden age for the independent author, a time when the friction between a creative vision and a global audience finally dissolved into a seamless stream of data. We were promised a world where high-quality production was accessible to anyone with a story to tell and the capital to invest in professional craftsmanship. Instead, we have entered the era of the Great Audio Laundering, a sophisticated and predatory systemic failure that is currently hollowing out the marketplace of the Audiobook Creation Exchange. For those of us who operate with integrity, who pay top-tier Price Per Finished Hour rates to ensure our listeners receive a soulful human performance, the current state of ACX is not just a disappointment; it is a calculated insult. We find ourselves in a bizarre technological purgatory where honest creators are flagged for using their own voice-clones while a growing legion of digital miscreants successfully masks synthetic slop as human art, pocketing thousands of dollars in a heist that the platform seems either unable or unwilling to stop.

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The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire book cover

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For Deaf People Only: Our Latest David Boles Books Book!

After writing four books together in in 2014 alone, Janna and I are now pleased to announce our latest, and first, book published in the year 2015 — For Deaf People Only! — a brand-new David Boles Books Writing & Publishing book!

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