Nevermind

by Richard Seltzer

The lives of Ruth and Mark are transformed by nevermind magic that Ruth learned from her mother—magic that can undo what has been done and alter the shape of reality. They fall in love and marry in their early 20s during WWII. They split up, then meet forty years later and fall in love again. When they first meet, their on-again-off-again romance and the challenges of wartime America force them to grow up quickly. Their marriage falls apart when they lose their four-month-old son, Davey, during a transcontinental train trip. They blame one another and divorce. Then, separately, each of them invokes nevermind, finds Davey, and raises him. When they meet and fall in love for the second time, they realize they've been living in parallel worlds and need to bring those worlds together into a new reality.

242 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 8, 2020

About the author

Author of two dozen books, I've been editor, novelist, Russian translator, parttime spy, Internet evangelist, and ebook entrepreneur. I've published children's fantasies, historical novels, and pioneering books about how to do business on the Internet. As a spokesperson for Digital Equipment, a tech leader in the early Internet, I saw how consumer choices and business models molded the outcomes we live with today. My latest book, "In Flux," puts AI into context and suggest how we can nudge the future toward either serving us or oppressing us.

I graduated from Yale, with a major in English and went to grad school there in Comparative Literature. At Yale I had creative writing courses with Robert Penn Warren and Joseph Heller.

In my 70s I've finally been able to write what I want when I want, and I've been publishing 2-3 books a year. Most don't fit in established genres and hence agents and editors aren't interested. So I've gone with small and hybrid publishers which makes it difficult to get the attention of traditional reviewers. Now I'm finally getting some recognition, with reviews of three of my books appearing in the same issue of Publishers Weekly (June 9). Another book of mine (One Family) was reviewed in their July 21 issue. And yet another will be reviewed in their Sept. 8 issue. One Family also won the Connecticut Press Club's annual award for best non-fiction book.

My personal web site is seltzerbooks.com My Twitter account is @seltzerbooks

A list of every book I have read since 1958 (over 3500 books) appears at seltzerbooks.com/readall.html

Reviews

[Richard Seltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm the author, so of course I think it is great.

An account of a WWII romance veers off into an alternate reality and then another and another.

All three of my recently published novels (Parallel Lives, Beyond the Fourth Door, and Nevermind) overlap and echo in interesting ways, with stories inside stories and touches of magical realism. This is not by intent, but rather that all of them grew from my life experiences and from exploring themes that matter to me. Two more novels of mine that All Thngs That Matter will be publishing soon (Breeze and to Gether Tales) are of the same ilk.

[Rochelle S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Seltzer takes us on another spellbinding journey into an alternate reality that defies our familiar perception of space and time. "Nevermind" is a story with a backdrop that seems grounded on the surface, but turns into a flight of mind-bending twists. We find ourselves in a microcosm of a family, that resists the ordinary and predictable sequence of events. The tale of a married couple, Ruth and Mark, and their child Davey, is not linear. Separated in their marriage, both Ruth and Mark bring up Davey, but not in the way you might expect. Confronting their past, present and future requires our mind to accept possibilities that seem, at first, implausible, but fit if we allow our mind to enter other dimensions. This imaginative quality runs through Seltzer's extraordinary body of work, which is both intriguing in terms of their singular design and captivating in terms of the engrossing stories, themselves.