nOVELS
Mayhem (Pierian springs press, to be published in 2025)
Mayhem, the riveting sequel to Madness and the second volume in Jack Smith’s Fate Trilogy, plunges readers into a world where ambition, betrayal, and survival collide against the ominous rise of Nazism. Professor Meister, a disgraced German academic accused of plagiarism, finds himself entangled in a web of personal and professional crises. His relentless pursuit of greatness through the publication of his magnum opus is overshadowed by the crumbling state of his marriage to Anna, a Jewish woman seeking refuge in Amsterdam, and his own destructive desires for younger women.
Set between 1900 and 1945, Mayhem unfolds across war-torn Germany, the bustling streets of Amsterdam, and the surreal cafes of Basel, Switzerland, where Meister once studied under Nietzsche.
As war rages and the lines between appearance and reality blur, Meister’s life becomes a surreal kaleidoscope of paranoia and longing. In Basel, the ghosts of his past merge with the uncertainties of the present, while his obsession with Nietzsche as a “double” leads him deeper into existential chaos.Smith masterfully weaves themes of identity, morality, and the fragile nature of reality into a narrative that captures the dread and destruction of pre- and wartime Europe.
The story builds to a gripping crescendo as Anna’s abduction by SS thugs sets the stage for a heart-pounding finale amidst Germany’s catastrophic defeat.
Suspenseful, unsettling, and profoundly thought-provoking, Mayhem is a tale of human frailty and resilience in the face of overwhelming darkness. With its vivid historical backdrop, complex characters, and a relentless sense of uncertainty, this novel is a haunting exploration of the human condition and the chaos that lies at the heart of ambition and desire.
Volume 2 in the FATE Trilogy
Reviews
Jack Smith’s Mayhem more than delivers on the promise of Madness; it exceeds it. Moving along a clip so brisk you don’t even realize you’ve been swept away by the energy of Smith’s no-nonsense prose and sparkling dialogue until it’s too late: you’re hooked. I was hypnotized by the story of Hans Meister, a writer and philosopher whose dreams of success both sustain and taunt him throughout the years, and whose life seems a testimony to enduring against the odds. A page-turner in the best possible sense.
--Anthony Varallo, author of What Did You Do Today?
Starting with the death of his mentor Nietzsche (“God is dead”), Mayhem traces the mental and moral disintegration of a failed scholar through the rise of Naziism. That’s a dry description of a novel written in feverish, machine-gun prose. Had the protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Hans Fallada’s The Drinker produced a child together, the result would, indeed, be Mayhem.
--Peter Selgin, author of A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space
A haunting meditation on the fragile boundary between reality and illusion, where truth is as shifting as memory itself.
--Elizabeth Spann Craig, author of the Village Library Mysteries.
Jack Smith’s mad science experiment, Mayhem, second in the series Fate, presents with a quantity of quantum entanglement of style, of content, of language. Imagine that Hemingway had read Kafka, that Kafka had copyedited Hemingway…But it is, at last, the big Big Bang of narrative time that drives the dark matter of Smith’s metaphysical physics. It is Einsteinian in scale and by design and amplifies the background hum of the stars into an unsquare dance of Doppler effected sirens. Mayhem is a pleasing puzzle box that lets the clowder of Schrodinger’s crazy cats out of the bag. Or not.
--Michael Martone, author of Table Talk & Second Thoughts
Mayhem is a propulsively gripping novel. Its beleaguered protagonist, academic Hans Meister, pursues the publication of his doctorate thesis of philosophy with a Sisyphean doggedness as Germany and Europe disintegrate around him into the chaos of World War Two. Characters appear and disappear and change shape according to Meister’s increasingly tenuous grip on reality. Jack Smith’s deceptively simple machine gun prose renders Meister the embodiment of the dislocation and terror faced by ordinary people whose lives are overwhelmed by the forces of evil. A chilling reminder that despite what we propose for ourselves, history is bent on repeating itself. Could not be more timely.
--Peter Nichols, author of Granite Harbor, The Rocks, and A Voyage for Madmen
I must become the new Nietzsche, proclaims the unreliable anti-hero of Jack Smith’s Mayhem, the second volume in his celebrated Fate Trilogy. The 50-year-old Berliner Meister is cohabiting with his wife Anna, who will soon decamp with a young lover. Shuttling his semi-plagiarized dissertation between publishers and academic committees, Meister insists that while seeded with his mentor Nietzsche’s ideas, he too pontificated brilliantly. How we drank and drank and roared and roared on! Mesmerizing, hypnotic, and darkly humorous, Mayhem takes us from the opening follies of the 20th century to the Nazi defeat of 1945. The prose glitters and Smith’s staccato lines of dialogue and interiority are not only rhythmic but incantations summoning us into the Meister world of bars and cafes, late nights, hallucinatory dawns, and feverish writing. The Rhine before him. The blue sky endless over him, over all of it. Every word in Smith’s novel counts, yet we leave Meister still lugging his dissertation, which has grown to five volumes, 500 pages each, through the war’s riot of sheer destruction. A seductive irreal reality, Mayhem is a tour de force.
--Stephanie Dickinson, author of Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black & White
Jack Smith brings his earnestness, struggles, and successes in publishing and academia to bear in this dark, thought-provoking, tightly written novel. I adored the compelling realism of the dialogue in this book, as well as how far and wide it took me emotionally and through history. You’ll adore that and plenty more, too.
--Mark Wish, National Book Award nominee for Necessary Deeds
Madness (pierian springs press, to be published in 2025)
Madness by Jack Smith plunges readers into the gripping and turbulent world of Friedrich Nietzsche, unraveling the enigma of his tragic descent into madness. Through the eyes of Hans Meister, a devoted student and confidant, the novel captures the haunting unraveling of one of history’s greatest minds. As Nietzsche’s brilliance gives way to chaos, Hans becomes both witness and participant in a journey fraught with philosophical revelations, personal turmoil, and an eerie foreboding of Nietzsche’s ultimate fate.
Set against the vivid backdrop of 19th-century Europe, Madness immerses readers in an atmosphere of intellectual fervor and societal change. As Hans documents his mentor’s deterioration, he is drawn into Nietzsche’s harrowing world of nihilism and existential despair. But the story is not just Nietzsche’s—it’s Hans’s as well. As he wrestles with faith, love, and his own fragile sense of identity, Hans discovers that genius and insanity are two sides of the same coin.
Philosophically rich, emotionally charged, and darkly atmospheric, Madness is more than a fictionalized account of Nietzsche’s life—it’s an exploration of the human condition, the limits of reason, and the terrifying allure of the abyss. This is a tale of brilliance and fragility, where madness looms not just as an affliction, but as a shadow cast by the pursuit of ultimate truth. Prepare to be enthralled, unnerved, and deeply moved by this spellbinding novel.
Volume 1 in the FATE Trilogy
Reviews
In Madness, Jack Smith has written a thick novel that turns on and builds on questions of knowledge, meaning, and the place and fate of man in the world. Using the master/student relationship—Nietzsche and Meister—to explore the nature of music, philosophy and love, Smith gives us a novel that is not a tract but a story of the rise and fall of one of the great minds of the European intellectual world. What I like most about this novel is the way Smith leads us into a time when there were only three ways to connect character to character—personal exchange, the written word, and the telegram. Here, Smith uses the epistolary technique to dig into the lives and minds of his characters, and the pleasing result is both insightful and a personal history of a world at a watershed time just before the cataclysms that now define the 20th Century.
--Jack Remick, author of Man Alone, Gabriela and the Widow, and No Century for Apologies
From an infamous philosopher’s life and work Jack Smith has fashioned a taut, shapely, moving novel—no mean feat, when the philosopher is Frederick Nietzsche, and the life and work are equally chaotic. But didn’t Nietzsche himself say, ‘One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star’? As experienced mainly by Hans Meister, the former student and disciple who seeks to extricate his old professor from the depths of his madness, Nietzsche’s ideas flicker and dance through these pages.
--Peter Selgin, author of Duplicity and The Inventors
Jack Smith’s Madness: A luminous twist on Nietzsche’s Amor fati, a ‘love thy fate’ antidote by the philosopher who believed in nothing. Herr Meister, dual protagonist in Jack Smith’s singular novel Madness, is unable to countenance his mentor, Frederick Nietzsche, sanctioning the meaninglessness of life and impotence of reason. When confronted with Amor fati (love of one’s fate) as the antidote to nihilism by Nietzsche, then at the threshold of tertiary syphilis dementia, Meister adopts his exemplar’s alter ego. Smith ingeniously weaves a scholarly grasp of the pioneer existentialist’s oeuvre with the jaundiced acumen of Herr Meister assuming the philosopher’s insidious doppelgänger, shadowing him into the paradoxical Amor fati darkness.
--Dennis Must author of MacLeish Sq., et al
Jack Smith’s novel Madness is a fascinating blend of the philosophical and the personal. While philosophers search for the great truths, they suffer from their own demons -- insecurity, fears of rejection, paranoia, relentless ambition, unrequited love. Nietzsche’s protégé seeks answers from his mentor but is met with the silence of the madhouse. This is a most thoughtful and evocative book.
--Robert Garner McBrearty, author of A Night at the Y and The Western Lonesome Society
In Madness, Jack Smith imagines Friedrich Nietzsche’s final turbulent days through the lens of a student who remains under his uneasy spell. Masterfully told through an alternating perspective that invites the reader to inhabit Nietzsche’s consciousness while simultaneously glimpsing him as an object of study, Madness is more than the evocation of the life of a towering figure; it is a testimony and cautionary tale about the rewards and perils of getting too close to those whom we admire. A powerful, memorable book.
--Anthony Varallo, author of What Did You Do Today?
In his confounding confabulatory mock doc, Madness, Jack Smith concocts a sublime chaos that births a nursery of ballistic and balletic stars. The novel is our literary equivalent of the Webb Deep Space telescope seeing as it sees the reversal of time and the future of the past. Smith maps the gyri and sulci of the wrinkled Nietzschean mind as it jigs and jukes. This is a fine jitterbug, an eye-popping pop and lock of a book.
--Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
A former philosophy professor and prolific novelist, editor, and critic, Jack Smith knows his Nietzsche, where this reader--beyond the famous “God is dead” quote--does not; and part of the pleasures of Madness is its command of historical and intellectual context in the German 1880s. The main delight, however, is the portrayal of Nietzsche’s madness from syphilis and the impact of his ideas on a former student and disciple, who seems torn between unconventional women, possessive love, and reason. In Smith’s hands, Nietzsche’s madness portends the nightmares of the century to come.
--DeWitt Henry, author of The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts and Trim Reckonings: Poems
Amor Fati (pierian springs press, 2025)
Amor Fati follows Frederick, a restless teenager whose reckless punch lands him in hot water with Horatio Dark-a man tied to the shadowy underworld. Driven by his all-consuming passion for the enigmatic Lilac, Frederick tumbles into a maze of corruption and dangerous alliances, all while confronting the possibility of fatherhood and his own wavering moral compass. Desperate to clear his name and protect Lilac, Frederick pinballs between questionable allies: a lawyer more eager to collect fees than save his client, a crooked judge demanding under-the-table payouts, and the menacing Mr. Dark, Horatio's father, whose offers of "help" come with high-stakes consequences. With every choice, Frederick finds himself further entangled in debt and deceit. Lilac, harboring her own desires and secrets, both captivates and confounds Frederick, compelling him to propose marriage even as the truth about her pregnancy remains murky. Torn between loyalty and self-preservation, Frederick fights to hold onto the idea of a better life-an upscale apartment, a fast car, and the love he craves-while everything he's built teeters on the brink of collapse. In a world ruled by ambition and backroom deals, Amor Fati crackles with moral ambiguity, driving readers to question how far they might go for the person-and the life-they want most. Jack Smith's gripping narrative thrusts us into a feverish drama of obsession and consequence, challenging us to decide who, if anyone, can be trusted when every path forward seems a step deeper into the widening darkness of the abyss.
Reviews
Jack Smith’s latest novel, Amor Fati, told mostly in brilliant dialogue, is brisk, farcical and disturbing. His self-apologetic teen-aged, and relatively privileged male protagonist acts on wishful fantasies of lust, love, and material success, but as the teen’s mistakes grow dumb and dumber, the reader is held in a limbo of sympathy. After all, Smith implies, surrounded by vapid peers and corrupt predators—prostitutes, mobsters, lawyers, judges—what passes for fate amounts to social conditioning. Farce morphs into Kafkaesque comedy, then Westian satire.
--DeWitt Henry, author of The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts and Trim Reckonings
In the midst of his own life’s mess, Hamlet moans, “How all occasions do inform against me.” He didn’t know the half of it compared with the lot of teenage Frederick. For every attempt to climb out of a hole, the boy’s fate digs him in deeper—confronted by thugs with tire irons, a corrupt judge, a gun toting gangster, loan sharks, a desperate father, and a toying girl who demands more and more. His lawyer, Edmund Bulge, knows what Frederick faces: “Well, then, son, you’re in a peck of trouble. You’re what they call screwed.” Mr. Dark underlines that “We’re stuck with the hand we’re dealt.” An apartment manager urges him to “Love his fate.” Frederick’s capacity for such affection is certainly tested. Can he bring himself to embrace all of the woes Jack Smith heaps upon him?
--Walter Cummins, author of Seeking Authenticity
The trajectory of a young man’s life changes in an instant when he throws an ill-fated punch, setting into motion a chain of events that draws him further and further into a spiraling future. Jack Smith’s witty, engaging, and thought-provoking Amor Fati reveals how what we do shapes our future, and how much of our lives can hinge on a particular moment.
--Midge Raymond, author of Floreana and My Last Continent
If Raymond Carver and Elmore Leonard had a love child, Jack Smith would be it. In AMOR FATI, Smith has given his fans a darkly comic novel, the dialogue and action breakneck, the questionable decisions accruing with an inevitability that makes it impossible to stop turning the pages.
--Christine Sneed, Author of The Virginity of Famous Men
Jack Smith does it again with Amor Fati: an uncommon premise, snappy and engaging dialogue, quirkiness and oddity that will keep you both smiling and turning pages. Read this book!
--Mark Wish, Pushcart-Prize-Winning author of Necessary Deeds
In this satirical amalgam of good and evil, Jack Smith has welded together a story of Love, Law, The Mob, Comparison Shopping, Money, Hit Men, and Impetuous Youth. Frederick lives on the edge but wants to live like a prince with Lilac, his princess, and his red sports car. But life isn't easy for a boy on the outside and when the Law gets him by the throat, his life takes a left turn. Pay up or it's prison, son. Look at this tale as a tour de force rich with dialogue, character, action, and think "the deep belly laugh of the cosmic guffaw." Nothing is sacred in this modern-day Romeo and Juliet with an urban twist. Yes, love does find a way but not the way you'd expect. Great fun. A fast read.
--Jack Remick, Author of Man Alone, Gabriela and the Widow
The narrative of Jack Smith's AMOR FATI doesn't move so much on a straight line as it does on a wheel of fate with the spokes of love spinning this tale down avenues of escalating chaos. It's a trenchant attack on the American Dream, emphasizing the dark side of debts and loans and more debts and loans. And as always, Smith's trademark dialogue is crisp, original, and full of comical non-sequiturs and zingers. An absolute hoot!
--Grant Tracey, Author of the Hayden Fuller Mystery Series and Editor, North American Review
If Winter Comes (SERVING HOUSE BOOKS, 2020)
When Fanny Kemble, an acclaimed nineteenth-century British actress, marries Pierce Butler, a Philadelphia aristocrat, she is yoked to a philanderer, a liar, and, as she soon learns, a slaver. She must deal with a husband who expects her absolute obedience, as though she were one of his slaves. As an abolitionist, she feels compelled to go down to Georgia, to Butler Plantation, to witness, firsthand, her coerced complicity in this vile institution. An unwanted presence, Fanny soon becomes a force to be reckoned with not only for herself but for her husband’s mistreated slaves.
Reviews
From the outset, the reader of this luminous novel becomes Fanny Kemble’s rapt audience-of-one, consciously attuned to how her marriage to Pierce Butler, a Philadelphia aristocrat, will fail. At her husband’s slave plantation, where she identifies with the plight of the slaves, it’s as if the utter depravity of what she encounters transforms the Fanny we knew up to this point. It is the rare reader who won’t find herself gripped by the pulse-quickening chapters of this beautifully written book.
--Dennis Must, author of The World’s Smallest Bible, Going Dark, and Brother Carnival
Where in his earlier satirical novels, Jack Smith attacked the military/industrial complex and capitalistic greed, he now in dramatizing Fanny Kemble’s career, braves racism, patriarchy, and slavery as our national hearts of darkness. Kemble’s first person comes alive; settings are evocative as are manners and idioms of speech. Nothing in this timely, well-paced, and provocative novel feels forced. The story is all: authentic and moving.
--DeWitt Henry, author of Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays
A fascinating novel of a young woman as strong-minded and brave as she is beautiful. Every detail of 1830s America springs to life until you feel you are there: the theaters, the streets, the city slums and the interminable pain and hardship of slaves on a Georgia plantation and the drudgery of the daily endurance of a loveless and inescapable marriage. Based on the remarkable life of an actress and writer whose work is still revered, If Winter Comes is a marvelous addition to fiction about women who with little legal power made a huge difference in the world.
--Stephanie Cowell, author of Marrying Mozart and Claude and Camille, and recipient of an American Book Award
Run (SERVING HOUSE BOOKS, 2020)
Billy Horn is on the run with serious mob money in a satchel. He has crossed a threshold, inhabiting an alternate existence, a heavy dream filled with menace and deception. Meanwhile, driven by Schopenhauer’s will to live, he’s caught up in his sexual fantasies and his continual need to protect that satchel, which he sees as his ticket to somewhere good.
Reviews
Run is vintage Jack Smith. Billy Horn, a young loan collector in New York City, witnesses a mob shootout and grabs a satchel of cash tossed in his direction—the curse of materialism—which sends him running across America from mobsters who want their money back. He tries to live off the grid and dreams of his girlfriend and of freedom to study and write, but is haunted by protean types; a beefy cop, unbearably beautiful women and their menacing boyfriends, predatory matrons, and assassins dressed in black. Such figures are always there, no matter where. Smith is a master of present tense narration, inventive complications, and witty, disconcerting dialogue; and Billy’s experiences prove at once surreal and hilarious, much as Alice’s in Wonderland or K’s in The Trial.
--DeWitt Henry, author of Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays
Jack Smith’s compelling novel Run farcically evokes the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s aphorism that “Truth is most beautiful undraped.” While reading, I was reminded of the ever-stoic Buster Keaton vainly battling to join his wife trapped inside their house that’s rotating madly in a windstorm. In the book’s opening, Smith’s everyman narrator, Billy Horn, inadvertently catches a satchel full of cash in a heist amidst exchanged gunfire and proceeds to run off with it. Paranoia-possessed that he is being trailed, Horn adopts the “principle of obscurity” by abandoning old friends and lovers and incessantly changing his living quarters throughout the country every few days, the satchel of depleting greenbacks his sole companion. “A man is never happy,” Schopenhauer says, “but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so . . . for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing.” Jack Smith risibly limns in Billy Horn the tragic-comic arc of braving an irrational world.
--Dennis Must, author of The World’s Smallest Bible, Going Dark, and Brother Carnival
With a satchel stuffed with illicit cash, Billy’s on the lam through an underworld of bus stops and seedy motels. Dangerous people want that satchel, the one thing that will lead either to Billy’s doom or survival. Darkly comic, suspenseful, this is a fast-paced tale of a desperate search for sanctuary where the walls are closing in and no one can be trusted. Like a Hitchcock film, Run blends the real and surreal, and menace comes out of the shadows, including from the shadows within. Is it the demons of the mind, or are those the real demons beating at the door?
--Robert Garner McBrearty, author of A Night at the Y, When I Can’t Sleep, and The Western Lonesome Society
Miss Manners for War Criminals (SERVING HOUSE BOOKS, 2017)
Dean Troost is working on his master’s thesis in history and can’t seem—even though he realizes he must—to get beyond counting the war dead from the present war and innumerable past wars. The novel turns on the question of whether or not war is a crime itself, and whether the rationalizations offered for it are not dodges and deceptions to put a smiling face on an ugly truth.
Reviews
Miss Manners is a work of exuberant genius. Jack Smith is fully in stride, from Dean’s decent and muddled voice, and his gropings of conscience, to the intellectual bite of his anti-war theme, to the wonderfully distinct voices of his crowd of characters.
--DeWitt Henry, author of The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts and Safe Suicide
Jack Smith has written a darkly comic novella, in equal measures poignant and surreal. The extended dialogue at his hellish family reunion reminds me of the opening scenes of The Graduate, with characters we may wish we didn’t recognize from our own lives: the overbearing uncles, the soldier who, returned from the war, is on the verge of a spontaneous combustion, the graduate student who can’t find a topic for his master’s thesis. Hard drinks, a Hummer, young beauties with college degrees in comportment, the story is, in the end, a cry of anguish against our celebration of war and killing and all that is dark within us.
--Barry Kitterman, author of From the San Joaquin and The Baker’s Boy
Miss Manners for War Criminals with caustic wit imagines a family reunion wherein a young host, in his existential struggle to find meaning, strives to use his intelligence among those who have clearly forfeited theirs. While reading I was strongly reminded of Eugene Ionesco’s work. Like the esteemed playwright, Jack Smith excels in chafing the platitudinous while striking at the heart of the solitary anguish one experiences in what just might be a meaningless world.
--Dennis Must, author of The World’s Smallest Bible; Hush Now, Don’t Explain; and Going Dark
At a family reunion, Cousin Gere, a soldier back from war, goes out on a liquor run, suddenly loads his .45, and we know we’re in for a wild party. With dialogue reminiscent of plays by Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, in this satirical novel the reunion-goers move from banalities and absurdities to speculations and debates on war and war crimes, and the justifications we dupe ourselves into. Meanwhile, Cousin Gere keeps reminding us that he was the one who was there. Dark, often darkly amusing, this novel is entertaining, thought-provoking, and relevant.
--Robert Garner McBrearty, author of The Western Lonesome Society and A Night at the Y
The spirit of Dr. Strangelove is alive and well in this funny, trenchant, absurdist work of fiction from gifted satirist Jack Smith.
--Christine Sneed, author of Little Known Facts and The Virginity of Famous Men
Being (SERVING HOUSE BOOKS, 2016)
It’s a winter of snow of mythic proportions. Caught in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, Philip Fellows is meanwhile happy to be immured inside with his lover—free to dodge undesirable work—as he seeks continual sensual pleasure. All the while he is being tracked by a mysterious man in black, who eventually informs him he’s in despair. If Philip isn’t ready for Kierkegaard’s second stage, the ethical, he nonetheless becomes captivated by the beauty of a woman who is given to ramping up an ultra-rational, principled approach to the sexual.
Reviews
Jack Smith’s fascinating new novel, Being, may be his breakout work. One if its most intriguing merits is Smith’s ability to create characters that can’t be pinned down: are they crackpots, or are they serious people? Or are they both all at once? One thinks of Bellow’s King Romilayu; and Nathaniel West can be invoked as well. (There’s a touch of Terry Southern too.) The “square” protagonist Philip (he insists on being called by his formal name) is a magnet to a host of eccentric and beguiling characters, male and female, who insist on bending his ear as they seek to usher him into their often cheerfully absurd view of things—they convert Philip, one might say, as he stumbles about, looking for work: they attempt, often with comic results, to persuade and cajole him to join their dotty legions. They are all “operators,” whether academics, salesmen, charming women, nuts and/or louts. His female characters are particularly beguiling. E. M. Forster notes that fiction’s most salient value is making the reader want to find out “what happens next.” This novel has that virtue—and is hilarious to boot.
--Geoffrey Clark, author of Wedding in October and Necessary Deaths
Being is Smith’s third novel, and possibly his best, full of vitality, appetite, and wisdom. Philip, just out of college, sets off to find work, love, and happiness; his progress is as curious as it is tenacious, much like Alice’s in Wonderland. Dialogue is Smith’s forte, and as Philip encounters denizens of the adult world, they speak in varieties of jabberwocky. One is a Professor of Panegyrics at the local university, who wants him to do door-to-door surveys: “Everything is about happiness, Philip, and praise is a key cog, a fundamental mechanism of happiness.” His encounters with women, their boyfriends and ex’s, and a regional sales manager for hunting equipment are similarly muddled. Snowed in for a hotel tryst that lasts ten days, Philip digs out to search for more money and condoms, only to find the woman’s loutish boyfriend in his place when he returns. Peripety prevails. Another woman tells him “I can’t be part of a life that isn’t taking me seriously.” Wiser or not, Philip returns to the Professor’s job finally, and Smith deftly pulls together the novel’s philosophical ideas.
--DeWitt Henry, author of Safe Suicide and Sweet Dreams
Jack Smith’s Being is a raucous existential romp through a proverbial house of mirrors where some, to their delight, will perceive Kierkegaard and/or Heidegger gazing back at them. Philip Fellows, a hapless Everyman who is “running away from nothing,” is on an ill-fated quest for fulfillment through meaningful employment and diverse erotic relationships while engaging with others similarly alienated as to the whys and whats of existence. A trenchant satirist, Smith deftly blends humor with pathos, and throughout the novel Being’s protagonist is shadowed by a stranger garbed in black who when confronted declares, “You are in despair, sir.” The looking glass reflection Fellows cannot escape.
--Dennis Must, author of Hush Now, Don’t Explain, and Going Dark: Selected Stories
Icon (serving house books, 2014)
When Mr. Finger builds his first Finger a half mile high flipping off the fabulously wealthy, Peter Boatz, a professor of Icons, finally has a fertile subject for his Icons of Power book. But this gigantic, obscene monument to the rich, with enormous grassroots support, soon takes on multiple meanings for Boatz: the abstract versus the concrete, the ideal versus the real, and involvement in the world versus withdrawal.
Reviews
Just when you thought the art of satire was dead, out bursts Icon, a novel that, throughout, proves hilarious, engaging, suspenseful, insightful, benevolently fearless and all the more charming in its boldness and wit. Jack Smith has not only resuscitated satire; he’s roused it into standing tall to sing melodies bound to make it cool again.
--Mark Wisniewski, author of Show Up, Look Good and Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman
Jack Smith is a master of satire, bringing to mind Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders.
--DeWitt Henry, author of The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts
“I’m an Icon Man,” Peter Boatz said. “Thus I’ve got a lot to learn.” And learn he does, usually at the whims of others, in this fast, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant novel of late coming-of-age in the worlds of higher education, politics, and wealth.
--Gary Fincke, author of How Blasphemy Sounds to God, The Proper Words for Sin, and The History of Permanence
Beautifully written and fully imagined, a surreal parable of love and meaning, and above all else, the insatiable, blind human appetite for more. Sardonic, wise, and surprisingly tender.
--Man Martin, author of Days of the Endless Corvette and Paradise Dogs
Only Jack Smith could write a novel so mesmerizingly on target with our own excesses that reading it produces both hearty laughs and horrifying recognitions. Icon is wholly American, with all its promised possibilities and fractured shortcomings. Each page is a mirror, and they fly by with our collective images skewed, with our faces reflected in comic distortion. One of my favorite novels in recent years.
--Doug Crandell, author of The Peculiar Boars of Malloy and The Flawless Skin of Ugly People
Hog to hog (TEXAS REVIEW PRESS, WINNER, 2007 GEORGE GARRETT FICTION PRIZE)
A dark comedy written in rollicking prose, Hog to Hog deals with excessive development in a relatively pristine Midwestern rural area. The spoils of misadventure go to the top polluters, like Dick Columbus, who makes money for the state’s coffers with his Wheeleroo!, an ATV mega event that runs roughshod over the local nature sanctuary. Columbus wins a seat in the state Senate. Bernie Sapp, the novel’s protagonist, lacks political savvy and power and ends up in one of Columbus’s pet projects, the newly constructed prison. With a culture based on plunder and socio-economic injustice, the ordinary man’s American Dream turns into the American Nightmare.
Reviews
Jack Smith's stunning first novel, Hog to Hog, proves William Styron's thesis that 'only a great satirist can tackle the world's problems and articulate them.' The pace is feverish and rollicking, with non-stop action revealing new heights of national folly, greed, and excess. Bernie Sapp, Smith's protagonist, is by turn a fearful, angry, arrogant, acquisitive, horny, and touching Everyman as he scrambles avidly for his slice of the pie. Smith's prose is crisp and acerbic, his themes reminiscent of Heller and Nathaniel West: surely this is what black humor is all about.
--Geoffrey Clark, author of Wedding in October and Jackdog Summer
Boisterous and compelling, Hog to Hog is often a fun house mirror reflecting American materialism, greed, and crassness. Jack Smith's spot-on dialogue will make you laugh; this award-winning tale, the taller it grows, will convince you to treasure it as good old satire.
--Mark Wisniewski, author of Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman and All Weekend with the Lights On
A biting comedy that calls out society for its many faults, Hog to Hog is quite the treat.
--Midwest Book Review -- James A. Cox