Novels
The Missing Angel
A ribbon of light uncoiled as it disappeared in the skylight. He holstered his .38 and played the beam across the floor. Light boomeranged off the glossy surface of an oriental vase, Chinese emperor with concubines. The house was flooded with exotic artifacts, tapestries of Greek males dallying in bathhouses, Persian miniatures of temple-dancers, statues of copulating Tantric figures. Even the carpet, an oversized Tabriz that covered the entire floor of the living room, featured houries in veiled undress playing settars at the feet of swirling dervishes.
The Missing Angel | Read Prologue
The Passed Pawn
—Milan, Italy
She lifts her hands to her face, sniffs them, the wet, earth smell of them. The storm has been coming all night. Illegitimate couples case the nooks of the park for a few minutes of bliss, one set of shadows blending into another. There is always a pause in discussion, an averting of the eyes, when they see her. She draws her syringe, fills it, taps her fingernail on the barrel, and something flickers in her eyes. There is a shudder in the ground, like the base of a thunder. After the underground train passes, she lifts her left arm, inspecting the constellation of flushed red streaks against the discolored skin. She locates the protruded vein serpentining through ancient welts and bruises, and inserts the needle. Everything is swept away. The heroin travels across her like a flood, tingling as it bends the corners on her arteries, filling her organs with its icy deliciousness. She feels her jaws go slack and lies down, curled up, her right cheek on the cool earth.
She rises with the moon, vomits the excess of the drug and sits, crouched and shaking. When she turns her head, she sees an enamel leather purse, and next to it, a purple foot sticking out of the ground.
A Few Words About The Banner
In a story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Aleph is a small, iridescent sphere of unbearable brightness, its mirrory surface reflecting the entire universe, echoing the multitudes that is our world, our shared fabric of citizenship, an appropriate symbol for a site that dabbles in the written word. I subscribe to the notion that literature is the contemplation of the entire universe in a slow drop of rain, a point in space that contains all points, a reality beyond sights and sounds, beyond memory and conscious thought, encompassing the real and the unimaginable.
The symbol I have chosen as a pictorial depiction of Aleph is the Multiverse, which, according to physics, comprises the totality of all possible universes throughout time, all imaginable pasts, presents, and futures glimpsed in a slow drop of rain.
