The Unified Field of Meaning
The Unified Field of Meaning is an ambitious and wide-ranging attempt to weave together physics, philosophy, spirituality, psychology, and personal memoir into a single coherent inquiry about whether there’s a unifying truth beneath all of reality. Author Jay Nuzum moves through twenty chapters that span Einstein’s failed quest for a unified field theory, Tolstoy’s existential crisis and his haunting equation of 0 = 0, Tesla’s metaphysical intuitions about energy and vibration, comparative religion, Jungian archetypes, the Hero’s Journey, artificial intelligence, and planetary consciousness. The book culminates in a vision sequence that strikes the author as revelatory, a proposed “answer” playfully encoded in the number 82, and a final declaration that infinity multiplied by infinity equals one. It’s a lot. It is deliberately, almost defiantly, a lot.
What surprised me most was how emotionally honest the writing often is. Nuzum doesn’t pretend to be a physicist or a philosopher; he says so himself with disarming candor, mentioning that he flunked high school geometry. There’s real courage in that transparency, and it gives sections like the Tolstoy chapter genuine warmth. The extended meditation on Tolstoy’s A Confession is among the book’s strongest passages, tracing how existential despair functions not as a personal failure but as something closer to a universal threshold, a place where reason runs out and something else has to take over. The chapter on the unity of world religions is similarly handled with care, resisting the temptation to flatten difference while still pointing toward convergence at the mystical core of each tradition. When Nuzum is at his best, the writing has a kind of unhurried, meditative rhythm that suits the subject matter well. Some sentences feel genuinely earned. Chapter 14, “Let There Be Light,” drawing Einstein and Genesis into the same frame, lands with more philosophical elegance than I expected from a book that occasionally announces itself as searching for the meaning of life.
The book wears its ambitions openly, and there’s something refreshing about a text that refuses to stay in its lane. The later chapters on cognitive dissonance, AI, and planetary consciousness read more like a wide-ranging conversation than a formal argument. Ideas arrive with real energy, spark something in the reader, and then move on. The structural choice to include everything from quantum entanglement to the author’s tennis game to a vision at what turns out to be St. Peter’s Basilica creates a book that’s genuinely surprising. The final theoretical gesture, infinity times infinity equals one, is offered more as a feeling than a proof, which the author explicitly acknowledges. The tonal range goes from genuine philosophical gravity to self-deprecating humor and back again within the same page. I appreciated the humor, especially the Fred Jenkins bit.
The Unified Field of Meaning is a thoughtful, searching, and sincere inquiry by someone who has genuinely wrestled with the big questions and wants to share where that wrestling led him. It has something real to offer to someone standing in their own version of Tolstoy’s void, hunting for a framework capacious enough to hold both reason and mystery. For that reader, open to synthesis and willing to move with the book rather than against it, there’s genuine nourishment here. It would also resonate with those already drawn to integrative spirituality, comparative religion, or Jungian psychology who want to see those threads braided together with contemporary physics and personal narrative.
Pages: 158 | ASIN : B0GP3D5J8D
A World of Lithomancy
Dark Bringer follows a cypher cop, an archangel, and a miner’s daughter whose paths cross with the grisly murder of a corrupt consul. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
So Dark Bringer is actually the start of a prequel series that ties into my Nightmarked books. I’d always wanted to tell the story of how that world, called the Via Sancta, came about. When I finished that series (and fans wanted more), I knew it was time to go back and explore the origins. Kaldurite plays a large role in the Nightmarked books, and after much brainstorming, and tossing out storyline after storyline, I decided to focus on this very special gemstone that repels magic in a world of lithomancy. Where it came from, who found it, and how it ultimately shook the foundations of Sion—Cathrynne and Gavriel’s world. Of course, their love story is also a big element, and one that is touched on in the later Nightmarked books, too.
What is the most challenging aspect of planning a fantasy series?
Everything! They have so many moving parts. But having muddled through a few over the last ten years, I’ve learned to think the choices I make all the way through (as far as this is possible—there are always surprises). You’ll have to live with those choices (who survives, who dies, what are the limits of magic, etc) for many books to come, so be sure they’ll work with the larger story down the line. Some choices open doors, and others close them forever. It can be a daunting process, and I think that’s why it takes me longer to plot than it used to. I’ve made plenty of mistakes I regretted and don’t want to do that again! Oh, and here’s another one: don’t write TOO many characters, and TOO many storylines. That still tends to be my downfall, haha.
Do you have a favorite character in this first installment of The Lord of Everfell series? One that is especially fun to write for?
I’ll say it straight: Gavriel starts as an arrogant, uptight prig who needs to be taken down a notch, so I’m actually enjoying writing him more in the next book, War Witch, where he’s forced to reckon with the sins of his past. Kal is funny and smart, but she, too, is mainly focused on her own problems in Dark Bringer, and becomes more altruistic in the next one.
Cathrynne, who is both pragmatic and vulnerable, and just a decent person, is my favorite.
Can we get a glimpse inside Book 2? Where will it take readers?
I have not written the blurb yet, and it would entail massive spoilers to discuss Gavriel, but I can say that he becomes a lot more human (for an angel), Cathrynne goes on a quest to find the witch goddess Minerva, and Kal heads to Iskatar under the fake name Kayla Jentzen, which lands her in fresh trouble. Levi and the White Foxes are still in pursuit, but that’s all I can say for now!
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Cathrynne Rowan is half witch, half angel. Such unions are forbidden, and the offspring – called cyphers – are reviled as abominations. But Cathrynne’s powers are indisputable, so when Lord Morningstar is nearly killed by an assassin, she’s summoned to serve as his bodyguard.
In Sion, all magic derives from gems and metals. Cathrynne and Gavriel must hunt down a mysterious stone that’s left a trail of bodies in its wake. Along the way, they forge an unlikely kinship that threatens to blossom into something more. Something decidedly dangerous.
Then Cathrynne starts having visions of a fallen angel who will tear the empire from its moorings. It seems impossible that the upright and honorable Lord Morningstar could be this Dark Bringer. But if it is Gavriel… How far will she go to stop him?
Taking place a thousand years before the events of the award-winning Nightmarked series, Lord of Everfell is set on the sprawling continent of Sion, where witches, angels, and humans populate seven vibrant realms surrounding the Parnassian Sea. Get ready for epic intrigue, dragons, and a love affair for the ages!
Metafictional Novel
You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel starts as a theatrical comedy of Eugene Onegin, and soon expands into a surreal campus narrative involving academic rivalries, mysterious shootings, alien abduction, and the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It started with the play—the stage adaptation—which was initially inspired by watching Martha Fiennes’ 1998 screen adaptation in Russia, with my wife and her friends. They were hooting all the way through at the silly mistakes the filmmakers made, like having Russian aristocrats in the 1820s eat borscht—peasant food that aristocrats would never have touched. (They ate FRENCH cuisine, while speaking French.) What I paid attention to was that the whole movie adaptation was focused on the supposed “love story” between Tatiana and Onegin, the most boring part of Pushkin’s novel. What makes that novel come alive is Pushkin’s dual role in it: as Onegin’s friend, but also as the author and narrator. Your wonderful reviewer wrote, “I liked how Robinson lets Pushkin walk in and out of his own story, constantly poking at the thin wall between author and character, past and present.” I like that too! But it’s not something that I made up. It’s in Pushkin’s novel. It’s a metafictional novel from the 1830s.
What I did add to Pushkin, though, came out of a question I asked myself: Pushkin-the-narrator is looking back at events that transpired earlier; so when is he narrating it, and where is he located physically while he’s telling the story? And if he is both the narrator and Onegin’s friend, how is he slipping back and forth between the time frame of the story and the time frame of the narrating of the story?
And since Pushkin was writing the novel in exile, always worried that the tsar’s spies would report something terrible back to the tsar, why not have the man who shot him in the duel that killed him, Baron d’Anthés, appear as a spy for the tsar and then shoot him in the duel that Pushkin puts in the novel?
All that inspired the whole novel. Pushkin was a Russian-African, with subtle but unmistakable African features. Why not have an African-American theater director direct it and star in it? Why not have him suffer something like the fate that befalls Lensky and Pushkin in the play: getting shot? And if he’s the narrator, and then gets shot and critically (and mysteriously) wounded, and spends a week in a coma, who will narrate the rest of it? Nabokov is one of my favorite authors of all time; I don’t know his brilliant trickery as well as some readers, but I’ve read a lot about it, and I decided that making Nabokov’s ghost the follow-up narrator would be fun. And it was!
My good Russian friend Ivan Delazari read the book in manuscript and loved it, but commented that Nabokov didn’t sound like Nabokov; he sounded like me. So, since I had put myself in the narrative, not as the narrator, not as the author of the novel, but as a character, I had the dean, to whom he used to be married, comment that Nabokov’s voice sounded like Doug Robinson’s, and speculate that Doug Robinson wrote the novel. (As I say on the back cover, I’ve never been married to a dean, and I’ve never set foot in Liberal, Kansas—let alone worked for the nonexistent Liberal State University.)
The book includes a play, a campus narrative, and a ghostly metafictional layer. How did you balance those pieces?
My original idea was to mirror the events of the play in the events arising out of its production. As I wrote the latter, though, my weird SFantasy mind kept coming up with cool complications. I was never sure I was balancing all the various pieces successfully!
What role does humor play in exploring serious literary ideas?
I’ve been teaching literature to university students most of my life. I’ve written numerous books and articles about literary texts. And somehow, through all of that, I’ve gravitated toward the funny. I love the humorous classics the best: Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. James Joyce’s Ulysses. And then all the recent ones: Vonnegut, Barth, Pynchon, Coover, Heller. All of them have inspired me through laughter.
If Pushkin or Nabokov could read You-Gin One-Gin, how do you think they would react?
Nabokov’s ghost does react to the book, in the book: he disapproves. He thinks I’m not subtle enough with the hints of the supernatural. He was always much cleverer, much trickier, about the afterlife in his works. When Sherry sends him on a quest to find the ghost of William Shakespeare, he is tempted to fly away and not come back, and explains his disgust at my ham-fisted narrative strategies at great length. But because he loves Sherry—and because he is controlled unsubtly by me!—he goes anyway, finds Shakespeare’s ghost, whom he absolutely despises as a fraud, as not Shakespeare at all, because WS’s ghost keeps saying things like “Take a chill pill, dude!”
Pushkin would probably say, “Where’s the poetry?” Pushkin’s poetry in Russian is so incredibly brilliant, sounding exactly like someone talking but subtly and yet unmistakably following a complex rhyme scheme, that he is fundamentally untranslatable. Nabokov railed at Pushkin translations in English—they were too pretty, he said—and did what he took to be an “ugly” literal one of Eugene Onegin. And it is ugly. But it’s also boring. Nabokov doesn’t DO anything with it. It just lies there, inert. So that’s me disapproving of Nabokov! Whom I otherwise love. My use of dramatic prose (and a lot of humor) livens the novel up—but at the expense of the brilliant poetry. Pushkin-the-narrator in my stage adaptation says that Onegin is prose and he himself is poetry; and when Onegin retorts that he’s speaking in prose, Pushkin calls it a bad translation. That’s my guess as to what Pushkin would say!
By the way, I call You-Gin One-Gin volume 1 of the Liberal Kansas series. I’ve just finished volume 2: Love Borg, built around my stage adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Where nineteenth-century Russia is a kind of implicit backdrop to volume 1, nineteenth-century Norway features prominently (but spectrally) in volume 2.
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“In this hilarious tripartite Robinsonian cruise of metaleptic abracadabra, the authorial attributee of You-Gin One-Gin is at his novelistic best, chasing and transforming Pushkin, Nabokov, Philip K. Dick, Vonnegut, John Barth, and Shakespeare in the manner so obscurely familiar from his Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia and Insecticide.” —Ivan Delazari, Nazarbayev University
Who is shooting people in Liberal, Kansas, and why are the bullets mainly mystical rounds? What really happens the second time an American writer is abducted by aliens? How would Vladimir Nabokov have rewritten the book his ghost helps narrate?
You-Gin One-Gin answers these questions across three wildly inventive layers: a stage adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the narration of Kip Knurl, African-American theater professor at Liberal State University, and the surreal perspective of Nabokov’s ghost. Each section ends with a “shooting”—in the play, on campus, and in ghostly metafiction—though no one truly dies.
A genre-defying ride for lovers of absurdist humor, experimental narrative, and the exhilarating intersections of literature, science, and the supernatural.
Unconventional Narrative
All Told gathers a lifetime of poems shaped by place, memory, travel, politics, and aging, offering a wide-ranging portrait of one life lived across the American South, distant countries, and the quiet rooms where reflection settles in. Did you view the book as a kind of life story while putting it together?
Yes, in a sense, it’s a life story, or at least a story of my last 55 or so years on Earth. I think of it, along with Rites of Passage, as a personal legacy created from a large backlog of work reaching back to the 1970s. It’s a compendium of my poetry that I would like to live on after me, even if it lacks a wide circulation and serves only as a means of preserving a significant amount of my work for anyone who enjoys reading poetry and might find it interesting. It also gave me an excuse to dig through the whole body of unpublished work I’d saved over the years and organize it in a way that I felt would be aesthetically pleasing and offer its readers a perspective on my life and my struggle to create a sort of unconventional narrative that would reflect the changes in my life and my development as a poet.
Your poems often use plain, conversational language. Why does that style appeal to you?
I think the sort of plainspoken style of much of my work came about firstly through the influence of such modernist poets as Ezra Pound, H.D., e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, and the post- modernists, especially those in the New York School — O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Ignatow, et al. — who were attempting to break away from strictly metrical verse and traditional forms and appeal to readers who were highly literate but not necessarily steeped in literary history or the kind of verse taught in most university English courses back then. On the contrary, I followed many other poets of the time in taking the lead of Ezra Pound, who, around the beginning of the last century, envisioned a new style of writing that “will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power… I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.” Secondly, when I moved to Türkiye in 1993, I soon discovered a school of poetry that illustrated this modernist dictum in the movement called “The First New,” headed by Orhan Veli Kanık, who dreamed of writing a poetry so stripped down that it even “dumped words.” This movement arose most significantly as a result of the change of the Turkish script from Arabic characters to the romanized alphabet most commonly used in Europe and the Americas. It also brought European influences into the sphere of Turkish writing, with translations by Veli and other poets of foreign poetry, such as that of the Surrealists. Along with my reading of 20th-Century Turkish poetry that followed The First New, I became aware of the provincial nature of American poetry, which showed little influence of Surrealism and other important developments in Europe that had strongly influenced contemporary Turkish poets. So my view of modern poetry changed radically after I moved to Türkiye, and my own writing began to reflect this change as well. I was elated when the poet Güven Turan, who edited my bilingual collection Galata’dan: the View from Galata, noted on its back cover that I was really as much an Istanbul poet as Orhan Veli, even though I wrote my poems in English. This direct, conversational style of writing came to define my own work, even as I tried to incorporate other aspects of modernism and postmodernism into the poetry I was writing then.
Many poems reflect on aging and reflection. How has your perspective changed over time?
I’ve tended to measure the course of my life in phases. This can be seen as well in the course of my poetic experience, wherein the dominant “themes” change from one phase to the next. For example, in my twenties the principal idea that directed my writing was that of a “Muse,” gleaned largely from the writings of Robert Graves, and this idea changed, or evolved, into a Jungian vision of psychic forces that replaced the Muse figure with a spiritual “you” that for several years animated my poems and infused them with a “meaning.” Other phases reflected my discovery of Taoism and Sufism, philosophies whose main principles I’ve adopted and tried to apply to all aspects of my life. I found that I could trace the movement of my life through these phases that have determined the nature of my development as a human being and writer. I can’t clearly articulate the phase I’m in now except to say that it seems to concern my present role as an elder in my “tribe” and involves a further consolidation of the ideas and experience that form the basis of the ongoing questioning and quests in my work and life.
Looking back over this collection, what surprises you most about your own journey?
I’m newly surprised almost every day by my incredible luck at being who I am and to have survived and, for the most part, enjoyed my life’s journey up to this point. I think the poems in All Told express this feeling in both direct and indirect ways. I’m not religious in a conventional sense, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve somehow been guided and protected by forces that exist somewhere beyond my individual perception or understanding.
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Forever Kind of Love
Forever Kind of Love follows Willow Mason as she returns to her Ohio hometown after her husband’s financial crimes leave her emotionally scorched and materially stripped bare, and it pairs her with Zach Hayes, a country musician whose homecoming is shadowed by creative drift and his father’s dementia. Around them, Cedar Hill becomes more than a backdrop. The bookstore Willow manages, the unfinished apartment and darkroom she tries to reclaim, George’s birdhouses, and the threatened reshaping of Main Street all feed a story about what it means to begin again when pride has already been broken open.
I liked that the novel’s emotional center isn’t really the flirtation, though the chemistry is there from the start. It’s the gentler, sadder current running underneath it. The scenes with George Hayes gave the book its pulse for me. When he wanders off, and Willow has to search for him, or when he speaks with startling clarity about no longer being able to run the hardware store he built with his own labor, the story stops feeling merely cozy and starts feeling tender in a more hard-won way. I also appreciated the way Willow’s recovery is tied to work, art, and dignity. Her photography, her darkroom, and even her stubborn effort to stand back up financially all make her feel like more than a romantic heroine waiting to be chosen.
This is a book I admired for its sincerity. The writing has warmth and momentum, and Bagby is good at domestic texture, at meals being cooked, rooms being cleaned, little rituals of care accumulating into intimacy. But the language can also be very direct, even emphatic. Zach’s celebrity aura and the Marissa complication introduce a slightly soapier register, and there were moments when I could feel the story leaning into familiar romance machinery. Still, I found myself forgiving a lot because the book’s heart is so plainly in the right place. It believes in decency, in repair, in the idea that love is not just heat but steadiness, patience, and showing up when someone’s life has gone sideways.
I feel like Forever Kind of Love is less interested in dazzling the reader than in comforting them honestly, and that ambition suits it. I found the story affecting, especially whenever it slowed down long enough to let grief, memory, and self-reclamation breathe. I’d recommend it to readers who like small-town contemporary romance with an earnest emotional core, a caregiving thread, and a heroine rebuilding a life as much as finding a partner. It’s a soft-hearted book about bruised people learning that tenderness can still be trusted.
Pages: 312 | ISBN : 978-1509264308
Wisdom From My Grandmothers
Jo Ann Fawcett’s third memoir is an unusual act of intergenerational excavation. Through a series of channeling sessions with the Hedda Foundation, Fawcett interviews the spirits of five maternal and paternal ancestors, beginning with Rosanna Blue, a full-blood Cherokee woman born in 1764, and moving forward through generations of German immigrant farmwives, a Depression-era single mother, and finally Fawcett’s own mother, Betty. Each woman’s chapter blends recovered family history with spiritual dialogue and closes with a curated list of wisdom teachings. The book’s animating thesis is that generational trauma, specifically the suppression of women’s voices and autonomy across centuries of patriarchal society, flows invisibly through family lines, and that naming it is the first step toward breaking it.
What surprised me most was how genuinely moving some of these portraits are. Dorha, Fawcett’s great-grandmother, is particularly vivid: a farm wife who quietly asserted herself in her marriage bed, who gave up her dream of becoming a pianist, who baked mile-high apple pies during the Depression and infused them with a love her circumstances rarely permitted her to express openly. There’s real tenderness in how Fawcett renders these women, and it comes through even in the plainest prose. The writing itself oscillates between genuinely lyrical observations and passages that read like transcribed notes, but when Fawcett slows down, something quietly profound emerges. The thread connecting Rosanna’s forced silence in the white man’s world to Grandma Lella’s workplace navigation of predatory male colleagues to Fawcett’s own seven marriages is drawn with honesty rather than melodrama, and that restraint earns the reader’s trust.
Readers who approach the channeling premise with open curiosity will get more from it than those who don’t, particularly in the wisdom summaries that close each chapter. I found myself caring less about the literal veracity of these communications than about what the project represents: a woman in her seventies doing the painstaking work of understanding why she kept choosing partners who diminished her, and finding, through imagination or spirit or sheer willpower, the language her ancestors never got to use. The book is most affecting when Fawcett is honest about her own damage. Her admission that she didn’t fully reckon with her own molestation until she was seventy, or her mother stating that loving her father was like pouring water into a cup full of holes, are the moments where the memoir earns its emotional weight. The underlying impulse, to locate yourself within a lineage and decide consciously which parts of it you’ll carry forward, is genuinely valuable.
Wisdom from My Grandmothers is not a conventional memoir. It’s a personal reckoning. I’d recommend it to anyone navigating the aftermath of difficult relationships, anyone curious about ancestral healing frameworks, or anyone who has looked at their own patterns and suspected they didn’t start with them.
Teamwork! Betty the Iditarod Sled Dog
I found myself genuinely charmed by Teamwork! Betty the Iditarod Sled Dog, which follows Betty from her birth in a litter of aspiring sled dogs through training, first snowfall, early runs, and eventually the hard-earned thrill of the Iditarod, before gently turning into a different kind of coming-of-age story altogether. What begins as a tale of ambition and discipline gradually opens into something softer and more surprising, as Betty discovers that even after proving herself on the trail, her truest happiness may lie not in competition but in companionship, in the life she builds with Marie. That arc, from dream to achievement to self-knowledge, is simple but satisfying, and I liked that the book lets Betty’s life expand rather than end at the finish line.
What I admired most was the book’s tenderness toward effort and belonging. Again and again, it returns to the idea that doing one’s best matters more than glory, and that landed with me because the story never treats ambition as separate from care. I was especially taken by the scenes of the puppies experiencing the first snowfall, with all that fresh wonder and playfulness, and later by the finish of the Iditarod, where simply completing the race is understood as its own victory. But the part that stayed with me most was the turn toward Marie: Betty, for all her strength and training, turns out to be a dog whose deepest gift is joy, belly rubs, and love. There’s something unexpectedly moving in that. I felt the book quietly suggesting that a meaningful life doesn’t always look like the one you first trained for.
I liked the writing best when it was direct and earnest. The prose is plain and accessible, which suits a children’s picture book, and the repetition of ideas like teamwork, pride in one’s work, and always doing your best gives the story a steady moral rhythm. The explanations of sled-dog roles and race preparation also give the book an educational backbone that I think many young readers will enjoy.
Teamwork! is sweet and wholesome, and it carries a lovely faith in discipline, teamwork, safety, and love between animals and humans. I found it warm-hearted, memorable, and emotionally sincere. I’d recommend it to young animal lovers, early readers curious about sled dogs and racing, and families who like stories that pair adventure with gentleness. By the final pages, I wasn’t thinking about whether Betty had become a champion. I was thinking about how rare and lovely it is for a book to say, so simply, that being deeply loved can be its own kind of triumph.
Pages: 45 | ASIN : B0BYCVRN83
