Richard Barager's Blog

I’m thrilled to announce that The Atheist and the Parrotfish won Best Literary Fiction in the National Association of Book Entrepreneurs (NABE) Summer 2017 Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards. Congrats to my editor, Eric Pinder, our cover designer, Dale Pease, and to Dave Lane, publisher of Evolved Publishing. A team win!

Here is a radio interview I did with Kory French of Break Through Radio on his show “Book Talk.” Click the image or here to listen!

Check out the latest article I wrote for Psychology Today, “Life Without Pain.”

Here is a recent review of The Atheist and the Parrotfish and an accompanying author interview. I thought the interviewer asked some good questions that made for an interesting exchange. See what you think!

Bookpleasures.com

At long last, publication date. Years of work, the kernel of an idea, planning and plotting, characters who chose me more than I them, ideas that would not let go. How did it begin? What loosed this train in my mind, barreling down the track, destination unknown? All that mattered in the beginning was the journey, the process. A need. A need to write, to whisper and then shout to readers yet unknown…Hey, have you thought about this? And now to somehow cut through the noise, my publisher and I, somehow make ourselves heard amongst the tens of thousands of others who have something to say, a flash of their own they could not shake. But truth be known, if only one person out there reads my story and cares, if only a single soul is touched by what touched me and sees what I came to see, then it was all worth it. And what was it that grabbed me and shook me and demanded to be heard, insisted that I give voice to its essential truth? Visions, my friends. Visions. A pair of them. Two haunting, beautiful, maddening visions that gave rise to The Atheist and the Parrotfish. Read about them on my publisher’s blog and think about the images from your own life that swirl in your brain.

The things you remember.

Here’s a trade review of my new novel from San Francisco Book Review in the run-up to its pub date on Monday. As I have written before, patients and characters in novels inhabit the same three-dimensions: physical, psychological, and spiritual. Books go out next week–finally, in the hands of readers instead of critics! The moment all authors wait for, the reason we write…to share our work with others.

The publicity campaign for the release of The Atheist and the Parrotfish will kick off in a few short weeks, but before it does, I wanted to call your attention to an article I wrote some years ago about physician burnout for the widely viewed blog Kevin MD, with my usual connection between medicine and fiction. The original title of the piece was Quasimodo and Physician Burnout. Enjoy!

(Note: I may from time to time write about other contemporary novels that leave a lasting impression on me. Here’s one of them.)

Most of us can look back and identify a handful of crucial moments that determined the trajectory of our lives, clear in meaning in retrospect, but hardly so at the time. Ann Patchett’s deeply moving novel Commonwealth begins with just such a moment. Here is an excerpted description of the book from Goodreads.

“One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved…”—Goodreads

This summary of Patchett’s profoundly insightful family saga suggests that the fates of the bewitchingly dysfunctional families she writes about are determined by a single random event, an unplanned, spontaneous combustion of a kiss during a “chance encounter.” The notion that random events dictate the course of human lives is not new: Oedipus might never have raked his eyes out in shame if he hadn’t come to that fateful crossroads outside Thebes at the precise moment he did, for a most unfortunate “chance encounter” of his own. And yet, this most tragic of Greek tales was foretold in a prophecy, Oedipus’s fate predetermined, leading inexorably to his unspeakable disgrace. Are our lives really determined by chance, fated or otherwise? I think not. Bert Cousins and Beverly Keating, the first movers in Patchett’s story, exercised free will to spark their chaotic saga—very much like humanity’s first show of free will in the Garden of Eden, which resulted not merely in the dissolution of a marriage and five decades of chaos, as in Commonwealth, but in the Fall of Man and millenniums of human chaos.

Very little of it random.

This trade review from IndieReader is the latest to be published for The Atheist and the Parrotfish. Only two more months to wait!

Here’s the latest book review of The Atheist and the Parrotfish. Slowly building a file of good reviews!