New Titles in the Amazon Kindle Store

There are two titles currently on sale for 99 cents on the Kindle Store by resident author AJ Balkin. Check out their descriptions below, and click on the link to buy them at the Kindle Store:

The Fall by AJ Balkin

The Fall is a psychological, political and surreal thriller. Ahmad is trapped in a society of bright lights, loud music and mandatory State-enforced celebration. It’s as if the good times of the 70′s disco met Nazi Germany. Our hero meets a strange man by chance at the marketplace who leads him on a path of discovery with dusty maps and stories of a time forgotten. In the end, there is only the Fall.

The second story is a narrative time warp through one man’s refusal of a sculpted life. We meet him as a bachelor in a spartan apartment, filled only with the sculptors gifted to him by his landlord. The story then flashes back and forth between different anomalies in his life, and wraps up in an alien confrontation. Nothing is ever as it seems.

Our final story is a short reflection on work, laziness, alcohol, parks, dreams, succubi – and, conversely, youth, imagination, and insect societies.

Finally, the manifesto is a proclamation, more so than an argument, for the necessity of space travel.

The Lamare Tapes: Volume One by AJ Balkin

By the year 2020, America’s face will be scarred. Everybody can already see it — rumbles of discontent from the dispossessed and politically powerless, twisted sex scandals, new forms of invasive surveillance.

In steps Ms. Lamare, a young dominatrix who has infiltrated the highest echelons of the Beltline’s elite. She satisfies the rotten desires of our nation’s leaders in politics and business. And she’s paid in enormous clout, as she pulls the strings behind the scenes, always treading invisible and dangerous lines of power.

Follow Ms. Lamare’s encounters with our nation’s leading men — Senators, CEOs, Investment Bankers — and pay attention closely, for she will singlehandedly change this country forever.

The Lamare Tapes: Senator Kathog is the first in a series that will be plumbing the depths of America’s most powerful circles in risk-taking prose

The Lesser Casserole of Halloween Night

THE LESSER CASSEROLE OF HALLOWEEN NIGHT (Pictures Below!)

We begin with a tall mason jar full of macaroni shells, dump them into your cauldron of boiling water. Your shells must be acquired by nefarious and liberating means I say.

Let them clump and coagulate in the pot that has been both salted with the most ancient of sea salts and oiled with organic expeller pressed canola, and give it a whirl with a pot-holed spoon.

Let the pasta boil and toil under these hellish conditions for one fifth of an hour, return to assuage it of its tempered and boiling origins, and strain the noodles through the holes of a colander.

Fill a symmetric ceramic square deep enough for the fare.

Following this great step one must extract the necessary and requisite items to contradict the heat and torment of the noodles, and they are as follows.

The remnants of a bag of shredded cheddar cheese (about a cup), a half container of sour cream that has sat for an entire fortnight (about four ounces), three scoops of veganaise for good measure (about a third of a cup), an optional chicken’s egg, and a thumb sized cut of butter (quarter stick).

Heap these chilled accompaniments onto the ceramic vessel of noodles.

For our casserole to succeed in the invocation of the spirit of the Word and of Halloween we must also have baked a dark pumpernickel rye with love while the Sun was still on its arc of ascent as follows, using these ingredients in perfect measure and intent:

A mug and a half of coffee warm (about one and a half cups of brewed coffee) and spiced with the earthy pleasures of ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom (about a teaspoon each in the coffee) dissolve into the liquid two spoonfuls of molasses (about two tablespoons) and a lone packet of active dry yeast (two and a quarter tea spoons). Let it bubble and foam (let the yeast activate for fifteen minutes) as this is a sign of life and magic and reflects the great dictum “absolve et coagula.” You will come back to this liquid after one quarter of an hour and finds its thick layer of foam. Proceed in adding one and a half cup white flour, three quarter cup wheat, and one cup rye, as these three flours together will be the body of our beloved bread. Lastly mix in two spoonfuls (two tablespoons) of cocoa powder unsweet as this is the food of the gods, a splash of milk, and a spoonful of veggie oil. Knead this dough for ten minutes until it stretches with ease and elasticity, and allow to rise (in a lightly oiled bowl) for one hour. Put in the fire (oven) at three hundred fifty degrees for one hour whole and you will have this loaf of dark sweet rye that is sure to please.

Now cut off the butt end of this bread and dice into smaller pieces setting them to the side.

Return to the ceramic pan and atop your chilled constituents add the following in line with your tastes and desire (my recommendations are in parentheses): cayenne pepper (two tablespoons), nutmeg (two teaspoons), cinnamon (one tablespoon), cocoa powder (two tablespoons), white pepper (one tablespoon), ancient sea salt (one tablespoon), coriander (one tablespoon) and dill (one tablespoon), all these must be ground.

Mix the earthy spices and creams together in the tempered noodles along with a jam jar’s worth of tomato sauce (about a cup), throw in a handful of peas, leftover slices carrots cooked, and those diced pieces of dark rye that sit to your side.

Top with generous amounts of black poppy seeds and white parmesan cheese packets like the kind a pizza joint will give you, and bake at three hundred eighty degrees for one half hour.

And finally serve to those that wish to have spooky delight.

BONUS PICTURES HALLOWEEN EDITION:

I chose to wear a body with Schopenhauer’s hair for the night’s festivities:

And type this recipe out to you in full costume and regalia:

A.E.I.O.U.: Reading Allowed

A.E.I.O.U: Reading Allowed

If vowels are what lubes the structure of our words and worlds, allowing for the flow from thought to finger to ink to the story told around the new Moon’s fire, then they will be the angelic hosts of our project.

A: is for anticipation, the swirl in your heart before the story can reveal its trajectory. You know it there, and it is here in anticipation that we find our first goal. Some say that this mood is best served over the coals shining red and white at the base of a fire, and we agree adding this: our stories will be written to be read aloud, nothing more and nothing less.

E: is for entertainment, and all that it can entail. Sure, the aim of all stories may be true in their pursuit of this purest of pleasures, to entertain, but often it seems to entail only a vain entertainment of the sort. Ink can only evoke the simplest and elementary feelings of its colors: black, dull flutters through the heartache of a void, blue swatches of feeling patched onto the fabric of a blank page. But to hear the words dance and breathe through the mouth of the storyteller, to glimpse into the tiny passages of their sadness and enlightened joy: this is the aim of our project, nothing more and nothing less.

I: is for interpretation, and to open up its many lairs. Layers of meaning lay beneath the words on any page: the author, discontent, the morning sky that beheld that day’s words, the forgotten dream, a conversation held three years and forty seven days before, a tale that began with a question and ended in dilemma. Each of these influences hides behind a giant lead door, tall as the sky, that the reader must attack with the vigor of thought: but we propose something entirely different: that the lyrics of a story read aloud can charm these magnificent doors open with ease, coaxing their keepers to lower their defenses, and allowing these spirits of the story to run and mingle free. Our stories will be known with gestures, tone, the natural feeling of words and their play on our tongues: this is the meaning of these words, nothing more and nothing less.

O: is for obfuscation, hiding our meaning in the words we choose and more importantly how we say them. This is all I have to say here (for fear of being discovered), nothing more and nothing less.

U: is for understanding, the goal of any writer or braggart around the fire. The only thing both possess is their words, which are simultaneously their tools and treasures, and anybody worth their weight in letters must use them in order to be understood. Somehow there has been a forgetting, somewhere a bell rings under a purple and black autumn sky, and somebody is there ready to tell you the story of it all. Listen to their voice, as their voice will be their true measure: and it is this that I bring to you, nothing more and nothing less.