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Jonah Totentanz is a man with a number of frustrations: he has debilitating writer's block, he can't win back his ex-wife, Olivia, and his sibling rivalry with his idiot savant brother becomes remarkably one-sided after Samson becomes a world famous author and hires Olivia as his agent. Jonah hatches a plan to kill three birds with one stone which entails getting back his passion and wife by finding and turning over Samson's long-delayed second novel to Olivia. However, things quickly spiral out of control, leading Jonah to realize the skeletons in the closet that always prevented his life from being what he had thought he deserved.

A work of fiction.

"Los Angeles Man" is the story of Martin Dietrich, a music journalist who refuses to write the only story anyone wants from him: a memoir about his father, an infamous music-producer. When Martin has a compulsive tryst with his wife's erratic twin Laurel, she becomes pregnant and they're exiled from the Hollywood Hills to the outskirts of LA County. In order to support their imminent child, Martin finally agrees to write the memoir. By confronting the legacy of his father's failures and his own disastrous choices, he finds that his own path to redemption may not include forgiveness. Between the blighted immigrant neighborhood where he's landed and his old life, Martin must somehow find the elusive secrets to fidelity, fatherhood, and love.

One of the stories in No Comma, Period, Rage, begins simply enough with a family road trip to New Mexico. The parents are struggling (and failing) to maintain normalcy with their children as one of them faces mortality. In this collection, loss, anger, and confusion--and the repercussions that occur when they are left unresolved are explored. In a number of the stories a normal life is tested and thrown off the track by the unexpected.

In "1978" a boy struggles to survive at a new and dangerous school while still suffering from his father's death. The story "Inflation" focuses upon a teenage fence who desperately wants to maintain his needy girlfriend's happiness, but a friend's trouble complicates his pursuit of cash. In the title story "No Comma, Period, Rage," a broken hearted man agrees to leave isolation to meet a woman only to have his patience tested to extreme by a psychotic party guest. In "No Soap, Radio" a novelty executive seeking answers to his financial woes finds an unlikely solution in the seedy underworld of reality television.

These tragicomic stories illuminate the difficulties of communication, maintaining a Jewish identity, the intricacies of relationships and sex, and the need to find one's true self.

A collection of short fiction.

A collection of fictional stories

During the final stages of my mom's battle with Alzheimer's Disease, I realized the best way to care for her was by honoring her dream and taking the round-the-world trip she couldn't take herself -- even if that meant traveling to far-flung places while she was dying.

This is the story of one year spent backpacking to 18 countries around South America, Africa and Asia. My trip was made mostly solo, and it involved quitting my journalism career and leaving my newlywed husband during the first year of our marriage.

All I Ever Had follows the story of political radicals, Bernice “Bunny” Miller and Salvador “Sal” Ortuno. As leaders in the 1970’s anarchist biker collective the Freedom River Underground, the couple, along with friends and fellow revolutionaries Harvey, Kettle, Darnell, Mugger, Felix and Kane, are determined to re-shape the world. After sparking political riots at a local university, the group decides to blow up the capitol building in Austin, Texas. Calling it an alarm clock endeavor, their intentions are to wake the world up, to bring down the establishment and create something new, real, and meaningful from amid the rubble, proving that truth is indeed violent.

The group struggles internally with issues of violence and nonviolence, while navigating the underworld of radicalists, non-conformists and divergent thinkers. A hairless conspiracy librarian with ties to weapons dealers, a paranoid blacklisted screenwriter, and a powerful Sonoran curandera all cross paths with the group as Bunny faces a pregnancy, and together they highway the fringes and borderlands, ultimately coming to understand the cost of American social dissidence.

The story is told by Betts, Sal and Bunny’s would-be niece who finds herself struggling for a foothold in a world where so much is so overwhelmingly wrong. An activist herself, Betts is no stranger to tear gas and holding cells, but has become as disappointed with the efficacy of modern activism as it has become with her. Seeking a meaningful way to live, she has dropped out of college, left the apartment she shared with other movement members, and quit on her best friend and long-time boyfriend Milo, a tattoo artist and political philosopher. Mining her aunt and uncle for their story in the hopes of finding some kind of answer to her own dilemma, Betts finds the issue is further complicated as Bunny, older now, faces a bleak battle with cancer.

Calling out issues of class, race, sexism, authority and militarism, war, the economy, the environment, activism, morality, and the battle between the personal and the political, All I Ever Had confronts the questions, fears and despair inherent in being alive and aware in our present world.

You might have passed through here, maybe. Thought you'd stick to the blue roads, hit the casinos of Vegas by the back way. As you blew through this nowhere corner of the Mojave Desert you might have noticed the rat-trap shacks rotting into the sparse hardscrabble of greasewood scrub. And you'd have thought, "What the hell is this place?"

Wonder Valley.

Out here, thousands of dilapidated cabins crumble into the desert, each one 12 by 20, an outhouse out back. They sit on a grid of five acre parcels like giant game pieces on a hellish gameboard. Back in the day, thousands grabbed land out here, staked their claims under the final homestead program in the lower forty-eight states. Some folks made it, overcame the hardships and the elements, most failed. And over the decades, their old cabins sagged into disrepair. Few of the original 4,000 cabins remain.

But people have returned. Outcasts driven to this margin of society slinked in. Mental institutions resettled patients out here, and welfare offices consolidated recipients. Artists and retirees arrived for the scenic beauty, the spectacular sunsets, the limitless stars. The artists and retirees, the outcasts and mental patients live in the remains of homestead shacks, often single family favelas of scavenged cast-offs, old lumber, doors, scrap metal and weathered furniture, their cars on blocks or left for dead where they died.

Today, Wonder Valley is a community a world apart--an island, a desert Galapagos, a laboratory for the post-apocalypse at the very end of civilization. For many people out here--not everyone, mind you, not even most some would argue--but for enough of them who live there, Wonder Valley is the end of the line. It's the bottom of a vortex where those shaken loose from society roll, spiraling downward into it. People like Pizza Richard, Naomi and Dominic, Dingy and Fluffy, Tonya. Wonder Valley, however, is only one misstep away from any one of us. And once you're here, if you've no one to throw you a rope, you may never climb out. This is the true story of that place.