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And Then the Cow Was Drownded
A man with a difficult past, Steven Lansky, without a wife, after a divorce that could not help any, tells of his schizophrenia. Humorous and pathetic, poignantly real, he understands how mental health insurance saved him and childlike art became his passion. Steven invites criticism, using the Gita to identify with, as the warrior Arjuna takes on a personal significance, while consuming pressure, from a hallucinogenic nightmare in a House of the Rising Sun epic self-determinate haze. Bicycling and sailing rescue him. Tormented by relationships, brotherly love, even by bloody memories of an unfortunate incident and then an accidental spell in a far-off city–from New Orleans, to Boston, to Memphis and the North Country, whatever the setting–the lush, overwhelming calm, pervades a taut emotive narration. Lovers, women, give heartfelt adoration, but not enough to satisfy. This Bildungsroman moves through conscious memory as it progresses visually in a paradigm parallel to Irving Stone’s biography of Vincent van Gogh, whose art Lansky’s resembles. His nom de plume, or sobriquet, Jack Acid precedes him like the famed immortal charioteer Krishna. Torrid sex and various characterizations inhibit his telling the story straight. The story, dictated to a muse elevates artifice to art.
The Break
A Memoir
The Break is Steve Lansky’s harrowing and comic account of his descent into madness after he changed the medication he took to keep his schizophrenia in check. Written with a poet’s eye for detail and with great sensitivity and insight, it follows his quixotic quest to find love and literary success while trying to navigate a world that was not designed for people like him.
Life is a Fountain
Fiction and Sketches
A collection of vignettes and illustrations form a narrative about immigration, love, whimsy, and jazz. Set in Lisbon, Portugal, Clifton, Limoges, Querétaro, Mexico, Firenze, Italy, and Habana, Viejo a set of characters engage in eating, playing, listening, and flowing like water’s fertile essence.
A Black Bird Fell Out of the Sky
Novella
An experimental novella with two narrators, at times simultaneously presented in two columns on the page. One narrator is in 2004, making a journey to Kenya for a gambling junket, while the other, an out-of-work movie actor, is in 1954, also making a journey to Kenya to take photos on a safari with a prototype Single Lens Reflex camera. The photographer becomes involved with a Maasai prostitute and discovers a scandal involving Kikuyu game wardens. The gambler presents his novel on the Oprah television show, where a rival, who has written a factual account of the safari scandal for The New Yorker, upstages him. The gambler and the photographer personas dissolve, as the character publishes nude photos of the prostitute in Playboy and the prostitute transforms into a model.
Available from this website by the Contact form for $12.00 USD plus shipping and handling. There is no purchase button. Write to Steven Paul Lansky for instructions.
Jack Acid
An Audio Novel—32 chapters as aired on public radio in 1997
A post-modern Jacktale complete with bicycles, trains, marijuana protests, the end of a rainbow, and a lotus tree.
This is a first novel written as an experiment, and as in Tristram Shandy, the experiment is a topic for the writer’s dialogue with the listener. Lansky’s poetic voice carries the anguish of the young novelist whose ambition is to an enigmatic skill, and whose talent with the language is undeniable.
There were contradictions. Jack is an everyman of the 70s in America. The jacktale about LSD, the jacktale (a traditional everyman sort of story, probably can be traced to Appalachia) about a jack-ass, and trickster of sorts. The puns are all intended and extended. Jack’s roots trace to Cincinnati, an industrial and intellectual high ground on the edge of a river just outside of Appalachia and Midwestern by most standards. It’s just a notch too big and independent to be a suburb of Chicago, but certain specialists just cannot be found in Cincinnati.
CDBABY only offers this audionovel by download card. For purchase write to the Contact form to purchase a Download Card $25.00 USD or Download Sticker $30.00 USD. Sticker is cd size as presented above.
Six and one half hours long, read by the author in 1997.