Just Released on Kindle Select

Six short stories and an essay on this not-so-serious topic.

"Chemistry" expands on the self-evident premise that you can't tell teenagers anything. The narrator of "Not Quite After Lisette is a forty-something high-tech executive whose wife is divorcing him. "Johnny Halo and Rock, the Tyro Shock Jock" is the first of three episodes from the Rollo Hemphill series of comic novels. In this installment, he falls upward into a job as a shock-jock deejay. "In the Valley of the Happy People" is from the second book, Rubber Babes, and "Spin Cycle" is a chapter from the third book, Farnsworth's Revenge: Rollo's End. "In the Gallery of American Art" is a story about a woman who wakes up on her birthday thinking her life is perfect. And of course it's not. It is excerpted from the novel Bonfire of the Vanderbilts, a work in progress. The afterward essay "Boychik Lit" is a think piece on male-centered comic fiction.

It's available from Kindle Select for $2.99. Always free to Amazon Prime members.

New for Kindle: The Death of Hypatia and the End of Fate

A brief historical essay that offers some new insights based on historical inferences and cultural context.

You might not expect a practitioner of male-centered comic fiction to be writing serious nonfiction about a famous female, much less an ancient one about whom almost nothing is known. This brief essay presents conclusions from research I did for my play Hypatia of Alexandria, which was a finalist in the Long Beach Playhouse New Works Competition. At this time, it's exclusively available from Amazon in Kindle format, free to Prime subscribers and otherwise $9.99, which may seem pricey but not if you are as fascinated by the topic as I have been.

Here's the catalog description: In this historical essay, freelance writer Gerald Everett Jones correlates the few details known about the death of the last Greek-speaking philosopher with the religious and political revolution that overtook her. Jones explains how, centuries earlier, Egyptian priest Manetho and Greek mystic Timotheus created the cult of Sarapis at the behest of pharaoh Ptolemy Soter. Hypatia's identification with this religion got her killed and her works suppressed, but the philosophy today's scholars call Hellenic Neoplatonism was rediscovered in the Renaissance and then again in the New Age.