Splendid Isolation

by Ben Lyle Bedard

During the plague of Athens, Socrates decides to find a wife. Taking with him his young friend Plato, the two begin a journey across plague-stricken Athens on an unlikely quest. With his voluble friend, Plato meets comedians and famously lazy Athenians before he is witness to the lost dialogue of Xanthippe. But burning Athens is not the safest place and Plato's aristocratic father does not approve of his choice of friends. The young Plato is thrust into a day that will determine his future and his own ideas of living in a dying world.

47 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 19, 2024

About the author

Born in Buckfield, a rural town in Maine, Ben grew up reading Tolkien, Stephen King, and Charles Dickens. When he went to college at the University of Maine at Farmington, he published his first piece of fiction in the local college journal. After moving across the country to study creative writing at Mills College, he began writing poetry as well as fiction. In his graduate studies, he published poems in several little magazines as well as a book of poems, Implicit Lyrics. He won honorary mention from the Academy of American Poets in the Friends of University Libraries Poetry Prize for his poem “All the Wind Points East.” During this time, he also worked on a collaboration with the painter Jackie Felix to produce the chapbook “We’re Really Happy”. Soon afterwards, he returned to writing fiction, his first love. While in Buffalo, New York and finishing his dissertation at the University of Buffalo, Ben finished his trilogy, The Slinger, a science fiction story told in a western dialect. The trilogy is set on a planet that is the unfortunate focus of two dueling superpowers. The first two books, The Equilibrium of Stars and Strange Bonds, were published with a small press, while the last book, All of a Darkness, along with the entire trilogy, was later released as The Slinger Trilogy on Amazon. In Buffalo, he met his future wife, Fernanda Glaser, a Fulbright scholar from Chile. To meet the requirements of her scholarship, she had to move back to Chile, and Ben followed her. They were married a year later, under crimson bougainvillea. Together they wrote and published a bilingual biography of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Criatura Regional/Regional Creature. While in Chile, Ben dusted off a book he had written in Buffalo called The Island, a coming-of-age story wrapped in a zombie apocalypse. Unable to find a publisher, he decided to publish it himself. After much revision, Ben renamed it The World Without Crows and released it on Amazon. It won an IndieBrag Award and had many favorable reviews. Encouraged by fans of the book, he wrote the sequel, The World Without Flags, which takes place ten years after the first book. He is currently living by the Pacific Ocean in La Serena while he researches and plans his next book.