Two Daniels is a work of memory, myth, and psychological reconstruction. The events are rendered through two consciousnesses — one young, one older — each carrying a different understanding of the same life. This book is not a puzzle to be solved but a meeting to be witnessed. The younger Daniel speaks from immediacy; the older Daniel speaks from consequence. Their convergence is the point.

A narrator who has abandoned the human need for meaning dissects the machinery beneath existence — the indifferent physics, the sentimental delusions, and the narrative compulsions that keep a species from seeing its own insignificance. The Book of Collapse is a literary autopsy of purpose, story, and the fragile architectures humans build to avoid the void. A cosmology stripped of comfort, it reveals the only honest state: the untold.

The Long Shadow of Slavery traces the unbroken line between America's original system of forced labor and the modern poverty that still shapes millions of lives. Drawing on history, law, economics, and lived experience, the book shows how the logic of slavery—extractive, punitive, and profitable—was never dismantled. It was redesigned.From Reconstruction to redlining, from convict leasing to the rise of low-wage work, the same machinery of exploitation reappears in new forms, each ...

The Diagnostic Republic reveals the hidden machinery of American governance — the drift, the forgetting, the palimpsest of obsolete rules, and the silent expansion of the administrative state. Through clear, structural analysis, Brian Padjen shows how Congress lost control of the system it built, how the bureaucracy became the primary author of daily life, and what it would take to restore a republic capable of seeing itself. This is a book for citizens who want to understand the architect...

Howard and Helen Harrington have been married for sixty years. Now, in the 80's, they make a bold commitment to end their lives on their terms. They have led reclusive lives much of the marriage, and now, are heading from Maine to California where they hope to walk into the Pacific Ocean, hand in hand. However, their journey is filled with unusual stops and unexpected moments that prove their resilience and their love.

In Padjen's 23rd book, Detective Arthur Finch is called to investigate the shifting circumstances of Baron von Gregory Williams, a case marked by silence, ceremony, and competing barons. As the inquiry widens, Finch proceeds under the suspicions, determined to find clarity in a world that refuses to provide it.

"In your absence you taught me presence."In a quiet room, a father tells his daughter a story.In the years that follow, that story becomes a legacy.The Cloud-Shepherd is a mythic meditation on grief, estrangement, and the quiet choreography of continuation.Through breath, silence, and soft transformation, this book invites readers to witness—not resolve—the ache of loss and the beauty of presence reclaimed.For anyone who has stood vigil.For a...

Volume IIThese poems were written in heat — the kind that exposes, the kind that transforms, the kind that leaves a mark whether you meant it to or not. Fire doesn't ask permission. It doesn't negotiate. It makes things burn, and in the burning, it shows what was real all along.If you're holding this book, you're stepping into the bright, uncomfortable center of the work. Read these pages the way you'd watch a controlled blaze: with respect, with attention, and with the und...

Volume IIIThis volume lives where breath meets tide — in the places that don't stay still long enough to name. These poems came from the part of me that drifts, dissolves, reforms, and returns. The part that doesn't ask whether something is solid before it speaks it.Air and water share a temperament: they move through whatever tries to contain them. They carry what we can't hold. They change shape without asking permission. These pieces were written in that same motion — in...

The Douglas family is ordinary in all ways that matter. They work, they argue, they try, they fail, they keep going. Over the course of a single year, their small decisions, private rituals, and everyday collisions add up to something larger than any of them can see alone. Told with warmth, clarity, and a straight‑faced sense of the absurd, The Remarkably Ordinary Douglas Family reveals the quiet meaning inside the moments most people overlook.

Collected Poems: Volume I -- Earth --Earth is the book of what stays. The book of what refuses to be hurried. The book of things that grow slowly, break slowly, heal slowly. I didn't write these pieces to solve anything. I wrote them because certain truths kept pressing upward, the way roots push through soil whether or not anyone is watching.If you're holding this volume, you're standing at the beginning — not of the story, but of the foundation beneath it. Read these page...

Neck of the World is the eleventh volume in the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award series. In it, Daniel Rzicznek offers poems that, in quick angular language, capture the natural world and at the same time extend it into a surreal vision, sometimes dream-like, sometimes dark. Alice Quinn, judge for the 2007 Swenson Award, says this of Rzicznek’s work: “Throughout, the language pulsates, always vigorous, by turns knotty and crystalline. . . . In Neck of the World, we ha...