Unpublished Work
No Man Is
Textiles
No Man Is takes place in under 24 hours on a number of islands in the New York area, most notably City Island (off the coast of the Bronx), Long Island, Manhattan Island, and Shelter Island. At the center of the story is the photographer Thomas Banks. At the book's outset he is alone on a winter's twilight, on the shore of City Island, deliberating on whether or not to return to his home several blocks away. He has just accidentally killed his dog and wrecked his apartment, after finding evidence that his fiancée, Colleen, is sleeping with another man.
The book sets to task when Nott arrives home to find that the apartment is not destroyed, the evidence of infidelity has vanished, and his dog, Isaac, is alive and well. Has he mis-remembered his own experience? And if so, what other experiences might be fabricated? Is he guilty of the things he believes he is guilty of?
No Man Is is Nott’s 24-hour journey to recover his own past, and to test reality against his increasingly untrustworthy conception of his own ill-fated life.
Price: $10,000
Follow Down The Light
A loose sequel to No Man Is, Follow Down the Light tells the story of Randy Kane, a former aspiring Long Island musician, now in his late twenties and working aboard a charter fishing boat in Whitepoint, Long Island. Randy is attempting to care for his father (who is suffering from Alzheimer’s) and for his pseudo-girlfriend, Wrench, who is strung out on an unnamed drug and seems to despise him. In fact, Wrench is sleeping with her dealer, Bickford, who happens to be one of Randy’s oldest friends.
Strapped for cash, Randy begins using his boss’s charter boat to ferry two men out to Crane Island, in the dead of night, for purposes neither will reveal to him. But when the connection between these two men and a series of local child abductions starts to become apparent, Randy has some difficult decisions to make. Who can he save? Who is worth saving? What demons is Wrench concealing? And what exactly is going on in the deep woods at the heart of Crane Island?
Price: $10,000
The Recidivist:
A Genealogy of Failure
An unfinished novel, The Recidivist: A Genealogy of Failure is at its heart a tale of friendship between MSW and DH, two young men whose ordinary lives are upended by extraordinary circumstances.
MSW is a brilliant reprobate who believes his own failure is preordained, something he seeks to write about in an imagined, autobiographical novel called, “The Recidivist: A Genealogy of Failure.” A long-running joke between him and DH (his less brilliant but equally feckless stupidity-partner), is the fact that the writing of the book is impossible, and what philosophers would call an “antimony”: if MSW could write the book, the relative success incurred by its completion would negate the very failure it seeks to chronicle.
But this embrace of genealogical failure is tested when MSW’s long-lost father appears in New York, terminally ill and desperate to see the son he’s never known. He tells MSW (by telephone) a story about how he’s been living in Algeria, using his French nationality as a wedge in his work for an Islamic Federation. His father, it seems, is a notorious and wanted terrorist. And he wants something from MSW. He wants his son to write his story.
Price: $5,000