Alan N. Krieger died at age 70, at the Morningside Nursing and Rehabilitation Center of Pelham Parkway, Bronx, NY. According to his Advanced Directives, he was to be buried at The Hebrew Free Burial Society for Indigent Jews, Staten Island, NY, along with his euthanized cat, in positions found in the sarcophagus of Amenhotep II.Mr. Krieger had often claimed that he “did not intend to be completely dead” when he died. Because it represented a potentially significant theo-scientific experime...

A collection of essays recent and ancient, written as essay-essays, or as sections of discursive novels, many about music and various composers, others semi-biographical, and others about the cultural and political scene in sixties-America to the present. September 11th, and F-35 jets make their inevitable appearance, along with war and peace, Israel and Palestine, American chauvinism and its love affair with capital punishment, Obama, Trump, and even several possibilities of the positive....

As World War I began, Gregor Samsa, a good man turned-roach, burst into the world, and literature has never been the same. Kafka’s 1915 Metamorphosis was a long short story, with an unhappy beginning, middle, and end.In Kafka’s Roach, Estrin (along with the Samsa’s housemaid) has rescued Gregor from his dusty death under a couch in Prague, schooled him at a Viennese sideshow, and impelled him over the Atlantic to take a crucial role in American history in the twenties, thi...

On Wednesday, Apr 13, 1968, at 7:30 PM, William Eugene Vanderbilt-Davidoff rose from the dead.Upon discovering Mr. Vanderbilt-Davidoff's open, empty casket, and after a short staff meeting, Randy, Jim, and Lamont decided to replace Will with four bags of roadway salt laid end to end, and close the coffin. Screw it down. It was a closed-casket contract. Who would know? And Dignity Funeral Home & Services could hardly afford the scandal of having lost a client.Et Resurrexit exp...

After having had more than his say in Golem Song, and The Prison Notebooks of Alan Krieger (Terrorist), Alan has pushed into line again to make sure that these distillates of wisdom would not be lost in the après-moi deluge of Monsieur Tromp.Standing on the shoulders of a diminutive giant, almost crushing him under his weight, Krieger adopts the format of Pascal’s masterwork to lead the reader through selected complexities of twenty-first century life, as suffered by himself, his c...

Alan N. Krieger died at age 70, at the Morningside Nursing and Rehabilitation Center of Pelham Parkway, Bronx, NY. According to his Advanced Directives, he was to be buried at The Hebrew Free Burial Society for Indigent Jews, Staten Island, NY, along with his euthanized cat, in positions found in the sarcophagus of Amenhotep II. Mr. Krieger had often claimed that he "did not intend to be completely dead" when he died. Because it represented a potentially significant theo-scientific experim...

By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers.A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking and who believes the world to be completely irrational, should not take one companion for granted, much less two. Women who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions, and his antic clowning all at the same time are not easy to come by.But when the thought arises in Alan that he’s been chosen” to deliver Jewish America from the threat of ...

The Good Doctor Guillotin follows five characters to a common destination-the scaffold at the first guillotining of the French Revolution:Dr. Guillotin, of course, a physician and member of the National Assembly, involved in many important events, including the Tennis Court Oath. Nicolas Pelletier, the first victim-or patient,” as they were sometimes called, since the new beheading machine was seen as a humanitarian medical intervention in the state’s technique of dealing death.

At once a chess master, a linguist, an athlete and an innocent in love, Arnold passes through the racial tensions of Mansfield, Texas (home of the author of Black Like Me) in the 1950s, the anti-war movement at Harvard, and both the Upper East Side and the Bowery, meeting Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, and Leonard Bernstein in the process, and finally learning the meaning of meaning.

Who would benefit if they really did bring The Rapture on?Marc Estrin follows another of his strange protagonists through a world troubled by what it knows and by how it applies that knowledge.From the first page, we are plunged into a global riot of paranoia, joy, and fear. But something is sadly familiar here, perhaps because we have been taught to anticipate a world in which people suddenly fly off the planet. It might be The Rapture. Or it might be some violation of the...

Hyde lives! (It’s only the well-meaning Jekyll who is dead.) Cloak and cudgel discarded, he is now a suitably smooth operator. But as Mike Tyson observes in the epigraph, “Everybody’s got a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.”

Given the exigencies of the time, Fomite would like to step outside its normal literary publishing practice, and add to its offerings a series of bound pamphlets on urgent political, social, cultural, and organizing issues from a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint.