Summary Comments on My Writings (U.R. Bowie)

 

SUMMARY COMMENTS ON MY WRITINGS

Given that I’m into the Octogenarian Age and unlikely to publish many more books, this is my own take on what I’ve published so far. When I started getting my stuff into print with the help of Create Space (now KDP) in 2014, I could not have imagined that, by the year 2020, I would have accomplished as much as I have. But so it has worked out. As of now, seventeen books published, and since 2014 twelve works of fiction.

How did I manage to bring out twelve fiction books in six years? Not because I wrote that fast. I had begun writing fiction around the year 1975, had also begun seeking publishers. Which I never found, so that by 2014—having accumulated a substantial backlog—I thought I’d better start self-publishing. Otherwise, I could very well never see any of my fiction in print. Now I have it in print, so I can look back with bemusement and wonder on the aggregate.

Three Big Durs Romans

These three are thick, ambitious literary novels, aimed at a reader of fiction at the highest level—a reader who maybe barely exists anymore. But if you want to write artistic literary fiction why dogpaddle along in the shallows; why not dive deep? What have you got to lose but your chains? Luckily, I’ve never had to depend on sales of books to make a living. I would have starved to death years ago.

Sama-Seeker in the Time of the End Times: Reminiscences of a Life in the Spook Trade (2019, two volumes)

Hard Mother: A Novel in Lectures and Dreams (2016)

The Tale of the Bastard Feverfew: One Man’s Journey into the Land of the Dead (2015)

 

Best Short Story Collection

In 2014 I published my first collection of short stories, Anyway, Anyways. Later, looking to bring together the stories that best lend themselves to oral performance, I took what I consider my most successful stories (some of them from that earlier collection) and created an audiobook, Such Is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence (2018). This is my best book of short stories and contains some of the best writing in a comic vein that I’ve ever done. I recorded it myself. Who better than an author to read his own works, since he is most keenly aware of the ups and downs of the intonations and rhythms of the sentences? Who’s that laughing at the end of the final recorded story? That’s me. I’m laughing spontaneously, because these stories are funny. They’re also good, and the laughter means I’m feeling happy that I wrote them, and grateful to whatever Deity blessed me with the ability to write.

 

Best Fictional Works With Reference to Things Russian

Two of the big novels listed above, Sama-Seeker and Hard Mother, feature a Russian angle. In addition, several other books that I value highly deal, directly or indirectly, with Russian life and culture.

Gogol’s Head: The Misadventures of a Purloined Skull (2017). This is a highly creative hybrid work, a blend of fiction and biography, featuring my favorite Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol.

Googlegogol: Stories from the Data Base of Russian Literature, Inc. (2016). Way back around 1980 I wrote the first of these stories, “The Death of Ivan Lvovich,” based on a true episode (slightly fictionalized) in the lives of two Russian writers, Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Bunin. At the time I had in mind a vague idea of writing a book of stories, each of them featuring, in one way or another, a different Russian writer. Back then I never figured I’d get that whole book written. But now I have, and it’s a book I’m proud of.

Disambiguations: Three Novellas on Russian Themes (2015) Contents: The Exhumation, Disambiguation, The Leningrad Symphony. Although having diverse plots and themes, the three novellas interact with each other. Two of the three are set entirely in Russia and feature Russian characters.

Early Novel

Looking Good (2020) stands alone amidst my other fiction. After it long lay in desuetude, in the backlog limbo, I finally got around to publishing it only recently, although it was written in the 1990s and describes the American scene of that time.

Best Earlier Published Works

A Roast for Coach Dan Spear (1997). This is a memoir that reads like a novel, about growing up in Central Florida and playing high school football. The book has a special place in my heart.

Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial (Northwestern University Press, 2006). A collection of Bunin’s short stories and novellas in my translation, complete with notes on each work and a ninety-page critical afterword. I spent more time writing this book than any other—some twenty-five years. Night of Denial is the best book of Bunin translations into English ever published.

Novelty Works of Fiction

Occasionally I have written rather quirky books that make an attempt to attract a readership. Each of the following fits into that category. I rank none of these as highly as the books mentioned above.

Cogitations on the White Whale, and on Other Matters of Inimitable Purulence: A Palaver Novel in One Sentence (2020).

One Ton: The True and Heartbreaking Tale of a Fatboy’s Triumph (2018)

Own: The Sad and Like-Wike Weepy Tale of Wittle Elkie Selph (2015)

 

The Latest

My latest published work—Here We Be. Where Be We? In the Shitstorm Year of 2020—is nonfiction. A potpourri of philosophical musings, nonsense verse, quotations from a variety of sources, opinions on American politics, and ruminations on life as lived in the year of the Covid plague. Not sure where exactly it fits in with my works as a whole. Not sure how it would compare in literary quality.

Here’s a ranking of what I see as my top ten in books, best listed first:

Such Is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence

Hard Mother

Googlegogol

Sama-Seeker

The Tale of the Bastard Feverfew

Night of Denial

Gogol’s Head

A Roast for Coach Dan Spear

Disambiguations

Looking Good

 

U.R. Bowie

August 15, 2021