Please click the image below to go on over the Spotify and listen to the sample chapter of Locus Amoenus. If you laugh out loud, you have to post a comment below, and, if you do, you can request a code to listen to the entire audiobook for free.
Please rate the audiobook on Spotify when you’re done.
With the recent release, finally, of the Locus Amoenus audiobook on all listening platforms, it’s time to reacquaint my readers with that 9/11 novel. Among the many interviews I gave in 2015, this remains my favorite. Barrett, a 9/11 truth activist, is also a very well-read academic, whose appreciation for literary works is notable.
“Until now, the only 9/11 themed novel of high literary quality was Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Locus Amoenus is the best fictional treatment of 9/11 yet. It’s hilarious, darkly ironic, playful, deeply moving.” –Kevin Barrett
The audiobook is available on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play.
My 2015 novel, Locus Amoenus, is a dark comedy featuring Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. The audiobook is the last great work by Emmy-award winning actor Ben Jorgensen. It has finally been released on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play. (Not yet on Audible. Soon.)
Want a coupon to listen for free on Spotify? If you plan to review the novel on Amazon, Goodreads, your own blog or social media page, or any listening platform, make a request for a coupon for free audiobook access via the contact page.
Ben Jorgensen began his acting career as the boy in Calvin Klein’s Obsession commercials directed by Richard Avedon. His credits include feature films, The Break with Martin Sheen and The Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio. He won Emmy and GLAD awards for his portrayal of the gay teen Kevin Sheffield in All My Children and also had a feature role in As the World Turns. His theater credits include What Will People Think!?, a Strawberry festival finalist, A Season in the Congo at La Mama, Hamlet (as the ghost) and Trial and Treason in the lead role as President in 2015. He also wrote and acted in the original play Manny’s Last Stand, starring Austin Pendleton, which opened the Summer Strawberry festival in 2013.
Ben was suicided by the lockdowns in 2020.
Having gone through the Co\/iD-I984 debacle, many people have lost trust in the media and government. And they are wondering if the news wasn’t trustworthy about past emergencies, such as the attack on 9/11.
In the article linked below, which appears on Free the People, a new media organization, I discuss my decision to write Locus Amoenus, a dark satire about 9/11, which was published in 2015.
This week, the audiobook has finally been released on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play. (Not yet on Audible. Soon.)
Charlie Besso narrates the opening scenes from my new novel, “C0VID-1984, The Musical.” It’s not a musical; it’s a novel that satirizes that genre.
The Strange Recital, is a literary podcast featuring fiction “that questions the nature of reality.” On Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram.
“Cheek to the cold floor, thick sole on my back, I began to sense my place in this moment in history. I had thought I was playing the hero, arriving just in time to save my mom, when I was put in a chokehold, thrown to the ground and tasered in the groin.”
A young Winston Smith faces a dramatic cultural shift: lockdowns, masks, surveillance, riots. “How did we get here?” he wonders, in a new satirical novel that looks back at the last four years. Can this story end more happily than Orwell’s?
Just before the anniversary of 9/11 this year, I wrote and article for the Off-Guardian about how literary works can be useful for neutralizing the brainwashing effects of propaganda. Please click over to Off-Guardian to read it and come back when you’re done.
As most of my readers know, my 2015 novel, Locus Amoenus, which was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (by the publisher, don’t get too excited), retells the story of Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. It’s a high comedy, written to lure in the Atlantic Monthly subscriber, to trap the Vanity Fair reader with my erudite and clever prose. Once inside the story, I have them. They cannot unsee the scenes I paint. Continue reading
My new novel, COVlD-1984 The Musical, is a dark comedy about the 2020 lockdown and the 2021 vaccine roll out. As the title suggests, I have tried to rewrite Orwell’s story of totalitarian oppression so that it ends happily. Nineteen-Eighty-Four, starts low and descends even lower, with the hero Winston giving in to Doublethink. Orwell didn’t have any faith in the “proles”. I do.
My first inspiration to write this story came from the Danser Encore protests in the Paris train stations, where people took off their masks, forgot about social distancing rules, and starting singing and dancing. That defiantly joyful display presented a stark contrast to dance videos of the medical professionals that were so popular then, showing those automatons doing their absurd clockwork dances, so symbolic of the mass formation psychosis erupting around the globe.
Although the plot follows the lead of Orwell’s novel, the tone of C0VlD-1984, The Musical is inspired by the gallows humor of Kurt Vonnegut’s, Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Readers of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime will hear echoes of his descriptions of J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford in my descriptions of our modern day equivalents.
This novel is a sequel to my last novel, Locus Amoenus, which retells the story of Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Ben Jorgensen narrated the audiobook. He was suicided by the lockdowns. C0VlD-1984, The Musical is dedicated to him.
I’m talking to a really good publisher.
A short synopsis (contains spoilers) Continue reading
Live from Berlin, Viviane Fischer and our Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg in conversation with V. N. Alexander about Transhumanism.
Once again, the masters of The Strange Recital podcast, Brent Robison and Tom Newton have brought my short stories to life. In this episode I read two, “The Narrative” and “Signs and Symbols,” from a collection that I’ve been working on called Chance that Mimics choice. Like the other stories in this collection, these are about the art of making/finding meaning.
Why do writers write? Why do readers love to read? If you’ve ever wondered why people might enjoy fiction so much that they spend the better part of their waking hours engaged in it, listen to this podcast and the interview that follows. There is no greater pleasure for this writer than being able to sit and chat with other writers, like Brent and Tom, about writing. It’s the only kind of reward I need.
Listen to find out what a “message without a sender” might be.
You can also listen on Spotify. Just search “The Strange Recital.”
I have long been interested in monetary policy in general and local alternative currencies in particular. In Locus Amoenus (2015) I wrote about an imaginary community in upstate New York that created an alternative economic system. As I begin to write part 2 of the Locus Amoenus narrative, I note with pleasure how life imitates art: such a community now has started in the Hudson Valley. Continue reading