Shouting at the Gods!: Essays from the Esoteric Hinterlands

I fell in love with the essay form because I fell in love with authors who were masters of it – and snuck it to me through a side door.

Those authors were Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison. As a boy, I loved their fiction, and only learned after I was well-immersed that they were as prolific with essays as they were with short stories. I promptly started buying their essay collections – Of Time and Space and Other Things, and Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed are excellent exemplars – and added that form to my long-term agenda.

As I was becoming a journalist, I discovered Russell Baker, soon followed by Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson and a dozen other masters of the form. And in my years as a journalist, I invested great energy in it myself.

This collection represents, I hope, my best. I’ve done many such collections before, and this one is as random as any of them, but I’ve taken care to omit the frivolous and incidental: this batch is intended to present the best I’ve managed to date. I hope it lives up to that intention!