Benjamin Grabbed His Glicken and Ran

By Fred Jay Gordon

Benjamin Hackett -- frightening, fascinating, dangerous, lovable, a twenty-three-year-old living on the edge of madness -- explores the most remote corners of his mind. In his room at the boarding house, Benjamin works on, "Benjamin's Mysteries," in which he pours out his deepest anxieties as well as medieval fantasies of great beauty. He becomes enmeshed in a novel called "Glicken On, Baby, It's Now" -- a futuristic fantasy about Lex Baker, a super-hero of the 22nd century assigned to save the world from Operation Suffocate, an evil plot to pump noxiousness into the controlled atmosphere of the "megopolis." The language of the future twists rhythms into new meanings. Lex Baker's sexual exploits, his gratuitous violence, his surreal preoccupations, all strike a great response in Benjamin. When he meets Reeva, the author of "Glicken," fiction moves into his life in astonishing ways. The tensions and reverberations of Lex and Benjamin and Reeva smash Benjamin into new dimensions. Reeling, Benjamin takes up the study of the brain, staying on course for the final shocking ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fred Jay Gordon
• Release date: Feb 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465850836

Fred Jay Gordon

FRED JAY GORDON was born in the Bronx and lives in New York. He owned Pegasus, a red, 17-hand high ex-race horse he rode bareback and taught to jump five foot high fences. When Gordon was 16, he wrote and recorded a pop song, "Bye, Bye, She Cried," which was bought by Atlantic Records. He's swept warehouse floors and worked the delivery trucks for the Budweiser beer factory in Newark, NJ. He has a degree in English from UC Berkeley and received a scholarship from Columbia University in Film. At NBC Studios in New York, he worked as a Tour Guide and, on Broadway, he helped cast and raise money for two smash hit musicals and then worked as a salad boy and a waiter. His plays have been produced in NY, LA, Baltimore, etc, he's a member of the Ensemble Studio Theater, he's taught playwriting and English Literature as well as horse-back riding, appeared as a contestant on various tv game shows to pay the rent, worked the streets of Brooklyn as a city social worker, and done the graveyard shift in the Tombs in the prisons of downtown NYC. He’s a PEN Award winner and was a resident writer at the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY. He has written, AN AMERICAN FABLE, about the American dream of overnight success, and his newest book is the thriller, BLOOD NEVER DRIES. Reviews of BENJAMIN GRABBED HIS GLICKEN AND RAN: from Library Journal: "One hopes BENJAMIN won't be dismissed as just another offbeat experimental novel. It is an exciting book!" from Publishers Weekly: "...Benjamin's personal story is wild, with an extraordinary made-up language and a pun-on-pun series of sentences... The novel builds to a strong, dramatic climax and the effect is chilling." from The Christian Science Monitor: "Like a child of Zeus sprung full grown from the head of their creator ... this novel has not received the attention it deserves... The novel is operating simultaneously on three planes and finally on a fourth. Benjamin as a character is oddly captivating ... virtuosic ... exacting descriptions of Benjamin's room, physical sensations, and emotions are like a zoom lens bringing one in intensely close to him. Benjamin says of his Mysteries: 'Words are only a small portion of my life... They are weak technicalities which fail... Words are only words. And besides, I lie a lot.'

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