The Book Keeper’s Review of Alice

I really enjoyed this magical little book. The characters are strong, quirky, and believable, and the story is engaging and perceptive. I love stories which hide unspoken wisdom, and which continue to unfold in your mind well after the story has finished. A must read for everyone who loves unconventional, offbeat, and unpredictable story telling.

Kerry Hood
The Book Keeper Book Shop (link to site HERE)
Strathalbyn, South Australia

Thanks, Kerry! And come on, peeps. I could use a few sales and reviews this week!

Order HERE on Amazon.

A post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale by two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist, Gary Gautier

#1 Bestseller on Amazon’s Metaphysical Fiction (free) list
#2 Bestseller on Amazon’s Literary Fiction (free) list

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Hippies free

Hippies is free this week. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MTGGWZV/

Go on. Do it. Release your inner hippie.

• An Age of Aquarius epic by a two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist
• 4.1 stars in 133 Amazon ratings
• Featured in radio interviews on KSKQ Oregon and WRBH New Orleans

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The factory and the nerds

Here’s a new thread of my post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale, Alice, which comes in after Alice and Christopher discovered the head in the bushes. This thread introduces the factory and the nerds.

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Two rows of circular desks, three tiers high each, teetered on both sides of a hardwood walkway. Each circular desk was ringed at the top with spools, purple, magenta, and apple red, which looked like flowerpots from the vantage of the entrance. The purpose of the spools was difficult to ascertain, as each desk housed a nerd absorbed in work on a laptop computer. This was the factory, and these were the nerds.

If one were to wander the hardwood path all the way to the end, one could turn left and enter the manufacturing wing of the factory, where the nerds gave way to the tattooed machinists, although what they were machining was hard to say. There was a sort of assembly line, in a Dr. Seuss kind of way, but it ended at an open window, and no one seemed much to care what went on outside of the window.

If there were a chief nerd or a chief machinist, they kept to themselves. Everything and everyone seemed quite egalitarian at the factory. From the egg and sprout sandwiches at the kitchen counter to the orange vests for the machinists, a carryover no doubt from an earlier era, in which orange vests were necessary, to the accessory booth for the nerds, it was share and share alike at the factory. Someone must have been in charge though. The nerds were ever upgrading the AI capabilities of the product and the machinists fine-tuning the hardware assemblies, but the endpoint remained an afterthought. When the work was done, the soft metal specks at the end simply flew out of the window. Ladybugs. Probably, someone, somewhere, had a larger purpose for the ladybugs. But that was no concern to the nerds and the machinists, who had pleasant enough work, their own colony of tiny houses, and ample trails for hiking. They were in but not of New Arcadia, whose territory included the factory. There was no rule forbidding contact with the New Arcadians, but people thrown together in any life situation tend to keep to themselves. And so it was at the factory.

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Good day for book gifts

Get’m books for Christmas. Below are choice picks at bargain prices by two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist, Gary Gautier.

All on Amazon worldwide or in bookstores around the US. For e-copies, select “Buy for others” to send as a gift. For signed copies, email drggautier@gmail.com.

Click covers for links.

Alice
Kindle: 99c this week only
Signed copies: $14.50 + shipping

Alice’s little utopia in a dreamlike forest 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.

Schematics and Assemblies of the Cosmic Heart
Kindle: $3.91
Signed copies: $9 + shipping

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 into the heart of their own cosmic lives.

Love’s Ragged Claws
Kindle: $3.93
Signed copies: $7.85 + shipping

Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist. 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 three sins. The account moves back and forth across decades, pulling out the little epiphanies that would be reference points of meaning for the rest of Gabriel’s life. 

 

Goodbye, Maggie
Kindle: $3.88
Signed copies: $11 + shipping

Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist. In a culture of health food stores, gurus, quacks and seekers, Phil’s stagnant life is rattled when his charismatic brother shows up with the news that he has murdered someone and asks for sanctuary. Thus begins a dramatic comedy of misdirection, as our heroes find racism, madness, and unlikely friendships as they roll through the Louisiana bayous into New Orleans.

Hippies  
Kindle: $3.94
Signed copies: $14 + shipping

The Vietnam war resistance, psychedelic drugs, sexual openness, the freedom of the commune – it seemed that everything about the 1960s could be incredibly liberating or wildly destructive. Filled with the sights, sounds and ideals of the Age of Aquarius, this hippie epic follows Jazmine, Ziggy, Ragman, and a coterie of hippies as they discover an LSD-spinoff that triggers past life regressions and sweeps them toward a dramatic climax.

 

Spaghetti and Peas
Kindle: $5.99
Signed copies: $14 + shipping

What would you do if you 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, richly illustrated, hardbound picture book as a read-aloud or early reader.

Mr. Robert’s Bones
Kindle: $3.94
Signed copies: $11 + shipping

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.

 

Phineas Frecklehopper
Signed copies: $5 + shipping

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. But could rendering a recipe really make a hero? Absolutely! Read to see how. Then cook Phineas’s sample recipes! Ages 8-12.

Shipping (USA):
First book                                            $3.50
Second book in same shipment          $2.00
Additional books in same shipment    $1.00

drggautier@gmail.com

Ragged Claws Review

Lee Hall gives a new review of Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist novella, Love’s Ragged Claws.

“For a short read, Gary Gautier packs in so much …  I’m definitely urged to go back a few times and read it just to capture everything.”

See the full review at Lee Hall’s Book Reviews.

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Alice in pieces

Here’s a clip from Alice, a post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale, now available online and in bookstores in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Austin, and Guanajuato. (Cp. the opening scene here.)

xxx

John Wilson lifted one of his bushy eyebrows, and the black hairs came to attention. Alice thought of a black cat’s tail with the hairs standing in response to a threat.

“Your eyebrow looks like a black cat’s tail,” she said.

John Wilson reached up with a massive paw and touched his eyebrow, and then touched his equally bushy mustache, as if to compare the two. He looked for a moment like a distraught walrus sloshed in a button-down shirt. Then he went on.

“The fairies,” said John Wilson. “The hum went away by the pond last night. No hum for an hour and a half.” The fairies kept the whole of New Arcadia going. They were rarely visible but often audible, a humming that recalled the humming of bees restless to massacre the males and slaughter the other princesses to please their sister, the newly chosen queen. The fairies did not work in the fields or in the factory. They did not cook or clean. But it was they who wove a sense of destiny into New Arcadia. Without a sense of destiny there would be no going on, for there would be nowhere to go.

The fairies had no enemies – for how could destiny have an enemy? – save one. Ladybugs. Tiny orange specks with wings. Wings with tinier black dots. The ladybugs made no humming noise. No hint of massacres for the newly crowned queen. They just flittered in quiet beauty, careful to disturb no one, seen but not heard. Thus, no one, not Alice or Evelyn, not the kleptomaniac, not the mapmaker, not the white witch, not the rain king, not John Wilson, not even the sweeper as far as anyone could tell, could divine their purpose or what it was about them that touched the spleen of the fairies.

 xxx

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a dream of narrow passage

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BookLife and the HAL 9000

On Sept. 8, 2022, BookLife reviewed Alice, the post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale you’ve all been reading (or are eager to download and read today). Here’s a clip from the review:

“A whimsical, fairytale-like quality … magnetic … a storybook world [with] a flavor not often seen.”

And Northwestern University’s Jeffrey Burgdorf ran it through his nefarious artificial intelligence (AI) machine and asked it to create a cover image. Below is the actual cover (left) and the AI cover image (right). Take your pick.

Burgdorf’s AI, by the way, gave Alice “the first ever 5-star Amazon review done entirely by artificial intelligence,” though I have no idea what mysterious feelings beating in that mechanical heart motivated the encomium.

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Good books spreading south

Still in stores in New York, Chicago, and online.
Now in Austin, New Orleans, and central Mexico.

AUSTIN

NEW ORLEANS                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

GUANAJUATO, MEXICO

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Gary’s Shelf in NYC

Finally got my own shelf at Quimby’s Brooklyn, NYC!

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