LIBRARY
When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café
In this historical metafiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland, a present-day narrator trying to make sense of his past recounts the story of Viktor, a disillusioned academic forced into the Łódź Ghetto, Elsa, a captive Gestapo secretary, and her estranged fiancé, Carl, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.
Inspired by Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, Laurent Binet's HhHH, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, The Requisitions is a historical metafiction about history, memory, and what we choose to remember, a page-turning literary fiction about remaining human during inhumane times.
"Vivid in a way that is almost tangible ... In spite of its grim subject matter, The Requisitions is a strangely and luminously hopeful novel." —Raina Lipsitz, The Metropolitan Review
"Original, deftly crafted, memorable [...] one of those novels that will linger in the mind of the reader longer after the book has been finished and set back upon the shelf." —James A. Cox, The Midwest Review
Two best friends, a country bar, a famous burger and a bloodstained floor…
This coming-of-age tale isn’t for the faint of heart. Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two misfits: Slim, a disillusioned war veteran with a brutal neck scar, and Hugh Dawton-Fields, AKA The Beast, a seven-foot UNC basketball player with a proclivity for Southern cooking.
As an early summer hurricane forces Slim and The Beast to take cover in a country tavern, the bartender tells them that Sgt. Dykes has been haunting the place, raving about opossums, bathtub whiskey, and his estranged favorite cadet, Slim. With unflinching humor and dexterous prose recalling the liveliness of the Coen Brothers and Tom Robbins’ iconoclasm, the narrator observes the approaching hurricane and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up, laying out what's at stake in a friendship forged during the calm before the storm of the contemporary USA.
Slim and The Beast is an adult American fable about male intimacy, the pursuit of passion, and the myriad ways in which men in the USA can either transcend or succumb to that nation’s unresolved and violent past.
Slim and The Beast Publishing History
Originally published by Inkshares in 2015 and selling 1300+ copies, the author bought back his rights in 2022 to publish this definitive edition with Kingdom Anywhere, a Paris-based independent anglophone publisher that he co-founded with his wife, the artist Augusta Sagnelli.
While preserving the original spirit of the novel, this revised edition includes a new cover and layout to capture the spirit of an adult fable, complete with stylized chapter illustrations. At 156-pages, the novel reads like a quintessentially southern novel in the style of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish, who said the novel “offers us a glimpse of what the future of letters may be.” Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition is a meditation on a USA that once was, an adult American fable about the enduring myths surrounding success, passion, and masculinity in the contemporary USA.
chapter illustrations by Aaron Lopez-Barrantes
MFA Dissertation:
“History is Dead, Long Live History! Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction”
We tell ourselves stories to make sense of our existence. We tell ourselves stories to prove that we once lived. When we look at the past, we do it through a lens that seeks to explain the present, an attempt to imbue history with clear and defined meaning. We want order and explanations. We want to believe in cause and effect. But in life, as in history (and so too in literature), the most commonly accepted narratives are not those that represent the truth, but rather those that narrativize the past in a way that provides meaning to our current epoch.
MA Dissertation:
“The Humanness of Cruelty: Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl and the Psychology of Genocide”
Viktor Frankl and Alfred Adler were renowned theorists of the human condition. Both were protégés of Sigmund Freud and both proposed nuanced explanations of human behavior. Although their work is grounded in humanistic psychology (primarily focusing on human potential), Adler and Frankl also explain the human capability for cruelty. As a result, their theories should help qualify the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a Hamburg police unit of average citizens that slaughtered 38,000 human beings in Nazi occupied Poland. Although historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men furthers the understanding of what led these men to kill, few scholars studying the psychology of cruelty have given explicit credence to Adler or Frankl.
BA Honors Thesis:
“The Jewish Councils of Poland: The Evolution of Historical Interpretation”
On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Security Police, sent an urgent letter to the chiefs of the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) in occupied Poland. In the preface, Heydrich referred to a distinction between a “final aim” for the Jews and the stages leading up to this final aim. Part one of the letter demanded that all Jews be expelled from the countryside and then concentrated into ghettos with the aim of “[establishing] only few cities of concentration.” In part two, Heydrich expressed the need in each community for a Council of Jewish elders, which was to be made up of “the remaining authoritative personalities and rabbis.” These Jewish Councils were to be made fully responsible “in the literal sense of the word,”1 for the exact execution of all German directives. The councils were to take a census of the Jews in their areas and would then be informed of the dates of evacuation into the ghettos. The Germans’ plan was to concentrate the Jews into ghettos by using the support of these Jewish Councils. They were created to assist the Germans in carrying out various orders and at no time were they considered to be autonomous.