Published:
Amazon will tell you that the books I have published, all but two out of print, are “hard to find.” They haven’t looked in my basement. I am offering copies of my books at reasonable prices, I think, but I’m afraid I’m not geared up to take any credit card purchases. If you want to buy one of my books or prints, you’ll have to pay me the old fashioned way, by check. My home address is 27 Stockwell Rd., Hadley, MA 01035. I promise immediate response, and naturally, gratitude for any new readers. E mail: robert.abel@the-spa.com .
Riding a Tiger, or The Self-Criticism of Arnold Fisher. (1998) Now available in the USA through Weatherhill , Inc., 41 Monroe Turnpike, Trumbull, CT 06611--US $14. You can also get this book from the publisher, Asia 2000 in Hong Kong, for 98 Hong Kong dollars and shipping costs. Contact John Folwer at sales@Asia2000.com.hk for details on this and other great titles they offer. Or you can buy it from me, paperback only, for $14, plus $3 for the postage. This is a comic novel with a tragic twist about a foreign expert in Beijing who gets more than he bargains for when he starts bankrolling the free enterprise schemes of his Chinese friends.
Ghost Traps. This collection of stories won the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction in 1989 and was published in 1991. The publisher, University of Georgia Press, can supply the book. Or, again, you can order it through me for $15 plus $3 postage. Hardcover only. The book got a nice review in the New York Times Book Review in July of 1991. Three of the stories concern fishermen; many of the stories involve people close to the edge of disaster or into whose otherwise ordinary lives something unsettling or dangerous enters. One of the stories, "Appetizers," appears in several anthologies.
The Progress of a Fire. Originally published by Simon and Schuster, it seemed to arouse some interest from movie makers, but they never bit the bullet. The two main characters are a Viet Nam veteran trying to shake his demons, and a Chinese-American artist with a love of life. Their fates cross when a teen-age girl runs away from her abusive family and takes refuge with the artist; and the veteran, vigilante style, decides he is going to set things right on his own. Another pretty good review in the Times. Same price as above; hardcover only.
Full-tilt Boogie. This collection of stories was published by Lynx House Press, a small press with a big heart known mainly for its fine poetry titles. The collection includes the entirety of an early book of stories, Skin and Bones, and another dozen or so stories which explore, with some exceptions, lives of small town Americans. Some people, you know, think small towns are safe, sane, and boring. Really! Paperback only. $10 plus $3 shipping.
Freedom Dues, Or, A Gentleman’s Progress in the New World. Dial Press published this one in 1981, and reviews were good, with reservations. It is a comic historical novel, kinda, told by a Boston rake hell at the time of the American Revolution. The novel is his confession of how his world has been turned upside down by his Quaker wife, his apprentice (he is a newspaper publisher), and his slave. All of the “Founding Fathers” make less than dignified appearances. I had a lot of fun writing it! Hardcover only, $15 plus $3 shipping.
Skin and Bones. These are stories about growing up in rural Ohio, many told from children’s points of view. Colorado State Review Press kindly put this in print in 1978, in paper only, and only a few copies remain. Since the stories themselves have been reprinted in Full-tilt Boogie, I rather cherish the half dozen copies that have escaped decimation and rather imagine that they couldn’t mean more to anyone than they mean to me. Not for sale. Just FYI. In fact, if you find a copy out there in the dustbins of used and castoff lit., let me know and I may even buy it from you!
Books Looking for a Publisher:
I am approaching the finish of a trilogy of novels set in Beijing, China, and focusing on the relationships between "foreign experts" living in China and the Chinese they encounter in the course of doing business or teaching. The first one, "Riding a Tiger," is mentioned above, and is the only one published so far. The second one, completed recently, is described below with the working title "In the Hutongs." The third, underway and with first chapters ready for consideration, has the working title "Long Shadows." Contact: robert.abel@the-spa.com
Titles available:
In the Hutongs (working title) The main character is Chen Guo-yu, a Chinese civil engineer based in Beijing, whose adventure starts innocently enough when he attends a course in English where he meets one Prof. Bowser, American from Maine, who is in a bit of a spin after being dumped by his wife. Through Bowser, Chen meets a Chinese-American woman his age who has come to Beijing on business and coincidentally to look into some possible family roots. She does not speak Chinese. At work, Chen is assigned to take care of another foreign expert, an engineer from Russia, Arkadi Karpov. Chen finds he rather likes the American woman. Chen also discovers that Prof. Bowser, for some reason, wants to get to know Karpov. And Karpov wants a lot. Yes, it is a spy novel. And a romance.
Long Shadows (in progress) The third in a series of novels set in Beijing, "Long Shadows" finds areas of Beijing being progressively shut down and quarantined as a strange new disease advances neighborhood by neighborhood. The disease causes its victims to forget everything, requiring them to be re-educated (or re-programmed) about themselves and their times. The main characters are an American translator who works with Chinese businesses for the most part but who also teaches at "Bei Wai," Beijing Foriegn Studies university; his colleague, a U. California professor who teaches women's literature and related subjects, a specilaist in Emily Dickinson; and a Beijing businessman who has more irons in the fire than he can handle, and who is also being courted by some rather dubious Hong Kong enterprises.
The Deep, Briny Sea. This is a collection of stories which focus on New Englanders, especially those whose lives are lived close to the Atlantic. Several of the stories have been published. One deals with a group of homeless people in a big New England city; one concerns sailors on a commercial vessel who tell the stories of their greatest romances; another concerns a sister who inherits her brother’s personal computer after his accidental death and begins to discover his secret lives; another tells the story of fishing partners whose lives take separate paths after a wild party at the home of a friend, a chef.
Fishing Fools: Not Your usual Fishing Tales. This is a comparatively short collection of just over 50,000 words, whch includes eight recent stories with fishing as a subject or as background to other drama. Some are humorous, some tragic. They are a bit outside the box of the genre.
China Fever. Obviously, a book of stories on Chinese subjects. Some of the stories have been published, including “The Loyal Wife,” a story about a mother and her three daughters who are left to struggle and survive the Japanese invasion of 1939 with the father/husband off to war. Some of the stories are about foreign experts in Beijing; some are from the Chinese point of view, such as “Surplus,” about a young man in a family of five children who ends up marrying the village birth control officer.
Nuts and Bolts: The Craft of Fiction. In progress. I intend this to be a short, no nonsense essay on the aspects of writing good fiction, with an eye in particular to erasing all interference between the story and the editor and reader. A sample is available on a previous page here.
The Characteristics of Literary English. It is a ESL (English as a second language) text which concentrates on the difficulties and rewards of reading that kind of English used in fiction, drama, and poetry. The book was first written at Beijing’s Foreign Studies University, for use in a “long distance” teaching course designed to reach Chinese middle school teachers. Chapters have been used by the Open University in England. It is for the more advanced student of English who wants to enter the amazing and revealing world of English literary arts.
Contact: robert.abel@the-spa.com