Richard Seltzer releases TWO books in 32 days
Either Richard had these books queued up or he’s so prolific that he’s putting ChatGPT and its cousins to shame! Richard has released two books in just over one month — a novel and a collection of shorter stories.
Let the Women Have Their Say: a Trojan Novel was released April 30th, with this summary:
Because we’re blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn’t just what happens. It’s enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, Leda, and Hecuba.
Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you’ll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know.
Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition.
The other book, Trojan Tales, was released on March 30th is composed of stories selected from three novels, showing events of the Trojan War reflected through the minds of participants who are immersed in the immediacy of the moment. As the editor explains:
Because we’re blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn’t just what happens. It’s enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, and Hecuba.
Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you’ll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know.
Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition.
A standard synopsis/plot summary would miss the point of the book.
The story unfolds as traditionally known, but the personalities and motivations of the main characters are often surprising.
For example:
Helen and Paris don’t go to Troy and no one knows where they are until after the war has gone on for more than nine years. When she shows up, she had close-cropped hair and a jagged scar across her cheek (from an encounter with pirates.
Achilles is a cross-dresser. He has a romance with Polyxena, daughter of the king of Troy, who has the look and the training of an Amazon and can out-wrestle her.
Clytemnestra’s handmaid is her lover Aegisthus in disguise. Her children are his, not her husband Agamemnon’s.
About the Author
Richard lives in Milford, CT, where he writes fiction full-time. He worked for DEC, the minicomputer company, as writer and Internet Evangelist. He graduated from Yale, with a major in English, went to Yale grad school in Comparative Literature, and earned an MA in Comparative Literature from the U. of Mass. at Amherst. At Yale, he had creative writing courses with Robert Penn Warren and Joseph Heller.
Five of his recently published novels (Parallel Lives, Beyond the Fourth Door, Nevermind, Shakespeare’s Twin Sister, and To Gether Tales) overlap and echo in interesting ways, with stories inside stories and touches of magical realism. This is not by intent, but rather that all of them grew from his life experiences and from exploring themes that matter to him. Two more novels of his that All Things That Matter will be publishing soon (Breeze and to Gether Tales) are of the same ilk. These novels can be read in any order. They are independent stories, with stylistic and thematic overlaps. Each creates a different view of reality, a different way of trying to understand the mysteries of life.
He has written a total of two dozen books, including: Why Knot? (essays), Grandfather Jokes (humor), The Name of Hero (historical novel), Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes (translation from Russian), The Lizard of Oz (satiric fantasy), Now and Then and Other Tales from Ome (children’s stories), Saint Smith and Other Stories, the novels The Attic (with Ethel Kaiden), Breeze, To Gether Tales, a collection of essays Lenses, a book of word play jokes ASAP’s Foibles, and a collection of poems Dark Woods, in addition to pioneering books about Internet business. Complete list at seltzerbooks.com/seltzer.html
His personal web site seltzerbooks.com typically gets 50k-100K page views per month. His Twitter account with 13K followers is @seltzerbooks His Goodreads author page is goodreads.com/richardseltzer His Amazon author page is https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Seltzer/e/B000APBTAA
You can see videos of him reading some of his stories and excerpts from his novels on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLijQxz1ah2H2slnJM9wxmhbnlQNMEfH30