A Rare Opportunity

The Roots of R. F. Laird

A Six-Volume Bundle

Over 1,000 pages w/new title, personalized author note, and bundle discount

HOW THIS WORKS: You place an order for $39.95 and you receive six books amounting to 1,100 pages plus. That’s a 38 percent savings when we send you a check for the $5.00 signed by R. F. Laird. If you care about money. What you should care about is an autographed note from R. F. Laird and a lottery chance at a book bundle signed by The Shuteye Train. Like this.

No, this offer doesn’t include his 1,500+ pages of landmark fiction called The Boomer Bible and Punk City, his scathingly prescient Obama book, the scandalous satire of feminism (and defeated men) that earned him a 30-yr ban from American book publishing houses, his three additional Bibles, his sendup of Fox News, his word-for-word authentic WWI Diary from the trenches of the Rainbow Division on the Western Front, his illustrated memoir of living with the glories of sighthounds, or his next blistering book, due out shortly after Biden’s first 100 days. But it does show you where all those works came from, the roots of a writer unlike any other in American literary history. These books provide an intimate view of the life and formative influences of R. F. Laird, a.k.a. Instapunk, Daniel Pangloss, and Johnny Dodge.

The reference to an oak tree is not accidental. It is, in reality, the root of the matter. Read the other posts at this site to see why.

In the meantime, here are the titles and thumbnail descriptions of the good deal we’re offering as a promo for the most important book R. F. Laird has ever written. A book called Death of the Republic.

Yeah. This one’s new. And also the oldest. It’s always been the Missing Link. At the age of 37 he produces a stunning work called The Boomer Bible deemed by the Wall Street Journal “A sprawling, wickedly funny rewriting of the Bible that’s meant to sum up a generation” and by the San Francisco Chronicle (Gawd!)? as “One of the the oddest, darkest, funniest, most innovative books to come along in years.”

37?!! Where had he been? This new title is finally the answer. He was always a writer. Early stories he had thought gone forever were rediscovered a couple years ago by accident, proving just how hard he was working to be a “writer” back when the names of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and O’Hara were the keys to the kingdom. He was 22, a Harvard grad and a B-school dropout, a lost soul in search of a new way of writing. Which he found in just the six stories included here. In a way that makes this book an extraordinary artifact, naked trying mocked and satirized by the mature writer he would come to be in the Epilogue, making this little book into a gem of the kind we used to call Ars Poetica. The Boomer Bible was no accident of a management consultant who got bored and decided to try his hand at writing in his late thirties. It was simply the moment when he wrote the front-end piece to a book called Punk City, written for the most part in his late twenties. This new (old) title is all by itself worth the cost of the whole bundle. Think Dubliners >> Ulysses inside a few turns of the earth.

So who is this guy who dares to assault the literary establishment so totally? Pampered, always in the company of the rich, prep school, Harvard, Final Club president, jet-set consultant. Easy, privileged white-centric life, right? I was going to title this book Why I’m Me until the term ‘White Privilege’ entered the American idiom. So I changed the title. It talks about babysitters, grandparents, the cruelty of losing your parents to enforced Ivy League ambitions, because we privileged characters, in the old days, had to give up everything to succeed. Why, when I was broken and done, I started writing The Reckless Twenties. But there was beauty along the way. From childhood on. Beauty that still resonates in my life. 

Did I mention broken and done? Yeah. My life was privileged and then shit. How cool is the irony that a writer actually gets to star in his own picaresque novel? I used to interrogate lawyers I met on planes all over the world. (The flight attendants of Singapore Airlines are so beautiful you would never ask them for a date...) I wanted to know, because lawyering was always the trade they had in mind for my cold analytical brilliance, and they hated me when I said “No.” I asked the lawyers if they were happy, and they always said “No.” Then came the day when I was flying somehow somewhere between the U.S. and Europe and a guy in the next seat turned the tables on me. “You’re a consultant, right?” he asked. “A good one, I’m guessing.” I did my ronin thing.”I advise some companies, yes.” He laughed at me. Actually, he chortled. “How long?” he asked. “10 years,” I told him. He stopped laughing. He bent toward me and said, “You’re done. It’s too much. You can’t be a gunslinger for more than ten years. Gunslinger eyes. But you’re Shane now. Done. Go home. Find another life. Because this one will kill you.” He was right. I went home. Not because of what he said but because I could see my eyes in the shaving mirror. But I’d helped make my wife into a corporate creature too. I took up drinking again after a dozen years of sobriety. We split up. I lost everything, my marriage, the family home, my means of making a living. I wrote a book that got me banned forever. And I wound up in a drab apartment in Delaware. Where I wrote Writing America Down. My favorite part is me watching a little boy and his dad and a dumb cop. I wanted to help the boy, but there was nothing I could do.

Probably me at my deadliest. Maybe the best 100-page book in 50 years. Dismantling a self-proclaimed master satirist without using satirist’s tools, of which I have the whole set. Loving the women, that subset of them we used to know as ladies, and explaining why all the elections after 2000 are doomed to go wrong. All in the space of 100 pages. Best book in a long time.

So I became a blog star. Some days, with the right referrals, I got 10,000 hits. Until I was the only fool who took Obama up on his demand that we all talk honestly about race. I admired my own black heroes, Ali, Denzel, and Tiger, and I used the N-Word, to point out that black people use it too and they know who they mean by it. I thought we should all use the word until it had no more meaning. My contribution to the fair and honest discussion Obama said he wanted. The dean of conservative bloggers stumbled on this heretofore unremarked post and denounced me as a racist. Then everybody else did too. I had thousands of vitriolic comments every day for weeks, death threats, earnest hopes that my wife and children would be gang raped to death. A site called Slate led the charge against me. The conservative InstaDean has never apologized, though he himself has said much worse since in the days of BLM. Did I cringe, hide, and go away into that white night? No. I have continued to blog for twenty-some years, mostly on three sites totaling 3,500 posts and more than 5 million words (and half a dozen books, print, Kindle, and online), tantamount for the math-minded to 15,000 pages of commentary on everything from movies to sports to politics to literature and music to quantum physics to theology to, well, everything. “[P]articles” is just one of many books that could have been spun out of the social network morass if my wife and I weren’t both old and exhausted after our lifetimes in the computer biz. It’s a good book, this one though. Doesn’t need any soap opera to sell it. Just buyers smarter than the penny pinchers.

Title meant to show you how non-pompous I am. The new title has “Parade of Volumes.”  So does this. Also sonnets galore, haiku, and free and weird verse. As you might expect. A fitting bookend to my Reckless Twenties.

P.S. Seven is a magic number, the number of Harry. So there’s a seventh book too. Mostly written a few years after The Reckless Twenties. But it’s a book you can’t have, because we’d have to rebuild it from scratch even though a proof copy exists. As you can see here. Without an outcry of some sort, an actual demand, this is the only copy that will ever exist. That would be up to you.

Not the South Street history, not the weapons, not the tech, just the fiction. 140 pages of just writing.