top of page

graphics             video            writing              comedy           photography          music

Linked stories from 1999, set in northern California's wine country. My daughter was in high school at the time, and several of the stories are about the horrors of adolescence.  £5.99, while supplies last!

The most powerful and heartfelt of my novels. About how children brutalise one another even more wantonly than their parents brutalise them. £5.99, while supplies last!

A substitute teacher who played in a little amateur band s a teenager wakes up one morning to discover himself Jimi Hendrix reincarnate, as least talent-wise. The experience turns out not to be entirely pleasant. £5.99, while supplies last!

The Hudson Valley stories, some of them about earnest muesli-eating hippies of the sort in which the region abounds, from 2010. £5.99, while supplies last!

Use this handy form to tell me which of these you want me to send you!

Success! Message received.

Inspired by the true story of a San Francisco Giants fan being killed by a foul line drive. In my novel the fan is a little boy. Lots of baseball mythology gleefully debunked. £5.99, while supplies last!

I think I really hit my stride as a short story writer with this collection. I think I'm proudest of the one about my mother's descension into dementia. Others, I like to imagine, are pretty funny. £5.99, while supplies last!

Inspired by Angelina Jolie's and Madonna's avid Third World orphan-adopting. An aspiring UK actress adopts a child from the poorest part of the USA. Native Americans cultivate heroin. £5.99, while supplies last!

Inspired by Angelina Jolie's and Madonna's avid Third World orphan-adopting. An aspiring UK actress adopts a child from the poorest part of the USA. Native Americans cultivate heroin. £5.99, while supplies last!

In the world of Who Is Keri Fetherwaite?, my antic novel about the avid deterioration of American pop culture, the best way to win one of the singing competitions that one or another of the networks is always broadcasting isn’t actually to sing. Rather, it’s to cower piteously and then burst into tears, as the irredeemable nebbish title character does before being marketed, ultra-successfully, to country music audiences as The Godliest Young Woman in America. This in spite of her inviting aboard her luxurious bus the long-eyelashed young founder of the not-yet-notorious white supremacist organization The Exalted Order of the Crimson Nape.

In the world of WIKF, narrated by a lapsed folklore Ph.D. candidate turned guitar picker, the star of the show is no longer the most important member of a concert tour. That distinction goes to the pollster who crunches numbers during and after every performance to ensure that, for instance, the African American backup vocalists the tour has hired to appease the NAACP aren’t…too black. Conversely, the Justin Bieber-ish white rapper on whose I Remember Martin [Luther King Jr.] television special Keri is invited to appear employs a cadre of bodyguards from the, uh, hood whose principal duty is to keep assuring him that he’s actually the blackest motherfucker on the planet. “You the complete absence of light, yo.”

If Keri can’t actually sing, you wonder, how is it that thousands turn out for her every performance? Hey, it’s the 21st century! Her vocals are 90 percent prerecorded, and her sound guy has software that enables him, acting on the latest data supplied by the tour pollster, to make the remaining 10 percent evoke Edith Piaf, Tammy Wynette, Aretha Franklin — anyone! — in the exact proportions desired. Nothing’s too good for Keri’s audience! As for Keri’s implacably vengeful original material, with titles like “Judas in a Backward Baseball Cap” and “Next Time I’ll Cut It Off,” it’s all actually composed by miserable teenaged girls with actual talent.

By and by, Keri’s managers realize that the real money isn’t in country or even pop music, but in politics, and advise our guitar player narrator — who’s demonstrated that he’s willing to cut ethical corners to keep getting his paycheck — that he’s to run for the Senate from North Carolina, against an opponent who regards the Tea Party as reckless liberals, and who favors capital punishment for all unwed parents, though, being staunchly pro-life, she supports postponing the execution of single moms until after their little ones are born.

£5.99, while supplies last!

bottom of page