My novel, The slant hug o’ time, is scheduled for publication by Kitsune Books on September 5, 2012.

The following are among “blurbs” are planned for the back cover:

• “Playfully earnest and pleasantly baffling, The slant hug o’ time is a work like no other. Enabled by rhymes, puns, anagrams, science, pseudo-science, reason and unreason, it joyfully elides the past, present, and future, along with (I believe) new time zones yet to be discovered. In other words: it’s a slippery world out there, and welcome to it.”

Jim Krusoe (Toward You, Tin House Books)

• “In its manner of telling, The slant hug o’ time mimes ENTROPY. Time “just spirals back on itself, like a rhyme.” Smith plays with time (as he plays with language) and time plays with his characters. Everything goes to pieces before the Gates of Pearl or Peril…. I was thinking Nabokov’s Ada meets Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, swinging about in maybe parallel worlds and jigaboo time.”

Tom Smith (Jack’s Beans: A Five-Year Diary, Birch Brook Press)

And a few more comments:

…Beautiful, sweet, funny (very), elegantly written and utterly original.

…I had joy in the energy and irreverence of the language…

…What an amazing book! […} a treat and a welcome relief from most of what I read, and different.

…a page-turner.

…the shadow of Gertrude Stein here, but without the “look how original I am posture.”

Described by one reader as “post-cyberfunk” (whatever that might be), The slant hug o’ time is the wacky fictional memoir of a gay narrator who tells a tale of conspiracy and bizarre science that stretches from his grandfather’s interest in technology (stemming from a visit to the 1893 Chicago world fair) — through “Time Gaps” and into the mid-21^st century after the government in Washington (and most other nations) is transformed into loose federations or “confedos.” Along the way the reader encounters bizarre participants in a secret 1920s-30s experimental laboratory/think tank that develops a plan to change the world; his favorite high school English teacher, who helps carry out that plan, gains great power and corrupts the Internet and all electronic data; a gay Arab prince who briefly controls half of Europe; and a handful of other seemingly ageless characters who are intimately involved in transforming the world, along with a number of the narrator’s several lovers. This all takes place in Ohio (“Heventon,” Lima, Cairo, the Blue Hole), New York City, and California, as well as Dresden, Cairo, Ouagadougou, South Africa and the Middle East.

The text is riddled with somewhat absurd if not ludicrous scientific, political, philosophical and cosmologic elements, and all this is cast in the author’s intricately crafted prose, which is enhanced with anagrams, alliteration and embedded rhymes, often drifting into a sometimes lyrical poetic form that can resemble rap.