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Both books are now up and for sale in Kindle format. The shorter volume -- with novella and short story -- is also available in paperback. The proof copy for the novel has shipped and the paperback version of that one should be on the market within the week.

 As I have mentioned before, these stories are totally unlike my other books. They are about a professor (Damien F. Malachy) who teaches at a university outside Chicago. The school is designed for folks who don't fit in anywhere and the whole premise of the tales is to be quirky.

Damien, for example, teaches in the Queer Studies Department. But, as he says in the book,

I realize that the name sounds pretty trendy, yet another of those programs that have proliferated across the American college scene with a focus on some narrowly defined minority and its literature and customs. Queer Studies, sometimes more politically correctly called Sexual Diversity Studies, normally – normally? – deals with issues relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, bi-curious etc. community, LGBT for short. Or LGBTX for those who want to be as inclusive as possible. I am not opposed to such studies, being GQ myself. And by GQ I mean gay/queer, not the male fashion magazine Formerly Known As Gentlemen’s Quarterly. But LGBTX studies are not the purview at PPHU. [Philip Peabody Horton University]

Our Queer Studies focus on queer things in the good, old-fashioned sense of queer: unusual, unexpected, eccentric, odd. That may at times overlap things like sexual diversity, but the areas of study are not co-extensive. I suspect some of my LGBTX academic colleagues would insist that they may be queer in the sexual-diversity sense but not in the old-fashioned sense.

 At any rate, the stories are very PG-13, but forewarned is forearmed. Even the language -- with perhaps one or two slips -- is tame.

I published the books as authored by the aforementioned Damien and co-authored by myself. It is a literary conceit. I think of Damien as my other self.

No need to buy the books! Some of my friends have already read the novella and the short story and some people bought the novella when it was available as a stand-alone e-book.

If you are looking for gag gifts, however, for birthdays and other such things, go to Amazon and have a peek.