Gary’s Books

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Alice’s commune seems a small hippie utopia in a dreamlike forest, but the utopian surface begins to crack when strange things start happening. A small deformed creature with a bowling ball head appears out of nowhere and turns to Alice for support. Her trips to the pond start to bring  transcendental omens and strange visitors. Thus begins a journey in which Alice wanders away from her idyllic home to find another world and to slowly connect the dots of her own world’s missing history. This post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale is comic, poignant, thoughtful, and sparkling, a magical tapestry with many threads.

A poetic landscape with the impact of human passion and imagination. The poems are both personal and archetypal, rich in intimate joy and sadness, but also connecting to something abstract and eternal. The focus may settle on a brittle image, domestic or mythical, or on a brief feeling that opens a transcendental vista and then, perhaps, closes again. Each poem is tightly sculpted and easily read, but in a way that keeps readers reaching, connecting the dots in their own cosmic lives.

In this short novella, Gabriel enters confession for the first time in 50 years and tells the priest he has only three sins, all sins of the flesh, and the confession opens up the byways of human identity and human relationships as it weaves the tale of the three sins. The account moves back and forth between his hippie life with the three women in the 1970s and their continued contact in old age, as they reflect back and pull out the little epiphanies that would become reference points of meaning for the rest of their lives. (Adult content and language)

In a culture of health nuts, gurus, quacks, and seekers, Phil’s life becomes a fiasco of misdirection when his charismatic brother, Magnus, shows up to say he has murdered someone and asks for sanctuary. Magnus then disappears – with Phil’s girlfriend, Hermia – and Phil lands on an uneasy road trip through small town Louisiana with Gus, another rival for Hermia’s attention. Phil and Gus, white and black, find racism, madness, and unlikely friendships as they roll through the bayous into New Orleans. (Adult content and language)

“A beautiful naive idealism. Blasted by the Establishment and torn by its own contradictions. Jazmine, Ziggy, Ragman, and a coterie of hippies run loose and free until they discover an LSD-spinoff drug that triggers past life regressions and sweeps them toward a dramatic climax. This is the epic tale of hippiedom we’ve been waiting for, intimate in the lives of it characters but panoramic in its coverage of the sights, sounds, and ideals of the Age of Aquarius.” (Adult situations and language)

“In a neighborhood full of quirky characters, three kids’ search for hidden silver in an abandoned house pits them against forgotten ghosts and the house’s dark memories of racism and betrayal.  The quest for the silver is especially nerve-racking for Annie, the kid who actually sees the ghosts. Her friends want to believe her but can’t, and she herself is torn between running away from it all and following the ghosts into the house’s dark history.” (For young adult or adult readers)

One year, four seasons, an archetypal journey, a poetic landscape rich in the flora and fauna of intimate human connection, joyous and sad. The poems in this 42-page chapbook are mostly short and pithy, formally sculpted, but each is packed with concept and image, and together they build up an unforgettable sense of how much life can be lived in a year and how quickly that year can slip away.

Phineas Frecklehopper was not always picked first at sports. He couldn’t always remember to take a bath or brush his teeth or do his homework in every single subject. Still, he considered himself a normal boy in most respects. But he did have one peculiar hobby, or at least others thought it peculiar. He loved to cook. From pie to pepperoni pizza, if it could be cooked, Phineas would cook it. But could rendering a recipe really make a hero? Absolutely! Read to see how. And after the magical journey, try the do-it-yourself samples from Phineas’s recipe box! For ages 8-12.

Spaghetti and Peas (click for link)

What would you do if you suddenly saw a snake in the lettuce? Rachael had to figure that out fast.

And she found a magical adventure in her own back yard, within smelling distance of the spaghetti sauce her dad was cooking on the stove. Enjoy this zany, colorful, hardbound picture book as a read-aloud or early reader for ages 2-8.

To order a copy signed and personalized for your child ($17 includes the book and all shipping/handling within U.S.), query me at drggautier@gmail.com. To order from the publisher, All About Kids Press, or to view their full list of available and upcoming children’s books, go to http://www.aakp.com.

Landed Patriarchy in Fielding’s Novels: Fictional Landscapes, Fictional Genders (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 360 pages.

Landed Patriarchy looks at the intersection of class and gender politics in such Henry Fielding novels as Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. Fielding repeatedly attacks the gender constructs of bourgeois patriarchy, but does so to promote a landed patriarchy and not from any feminist sympathy. Understanding the unstable relation between class and gender conservatism in Fielding requires a larger look at 18th-century literature and culture, and at how modern theoretical approaches can sometimes clarify and sometimes muddle our view of what is going on in the great literary works of the 18th century. Click image to Amazon link. You can often find used copies for under $20, but list price is $119 for new.

Intro. to the Random House/Modern Library edition (2001) of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
The eighteenth-century British were not only remapping world territories, but were also involved at home in the concomitant remapping of conceptual space to suit the new world of bourgeois capitalism. In the first pornographic novel written in English, John Cleland remaps the concepts of sexuality, female identity, and maternity, and pins the remapping to an emergent bourgeois ideology. Just as prostitution figures as bourgeois social relations unmasked, so on the level of genre the pornographic novel unmasks sentimental bourgeois novel of the day. In satirizing bourgeois constructions of gender, Cleland is not at all boxed into a feminist vantage point but rather assumes a position that is generally sympathetic to the landed conservatism of Bolingbroke and Fielding and Smollett. (From Gary’s introduction). Click image to Amazon link.