“Obler's novel is the type of satisfying literary fiction that swings from humorous to dramatic to profound, all while maintaining enough narrative propulsion to keep readers turning the pages. … A multifaceted novel that succeeds as both literature and entertainment.”
– Kirkus Reviews, Feb 4, 2026
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There are those who play at theft, like actress Sylvie Virgule. Those who accuse others of theft, like Nolan Pilcrow. Those who protect corporations from theft, like Paul Boustrophedon. Filmmaker D. A. Chimister views theft as entertainment, and in Fort Green, Brooklyn, under his direction on the set of Love & Theft, the lives of Virgule, Pilcrow and “Bou” begin to intertwine. The new streaming series is the much-anticipated follow-up from the hit indie auteur, the mentor who launched Sylvie’s career.
In the Catskills, underemployed Hank Delaney steals to survive—not entertaining at all. And his one-time criminal partner, musician Ray Ramirez, gave up theft. But when the vintage muscle car belonging to Delaney’s high school nemesis, John Segal, becomes vulnerable, all bets are off. Delaney convinces Ramirez to con the sister. Shelby Segal is minding the car while her brother recovers, and her ambition to sing professionally sends Ray to his storage locker to retrieve his dusty keyboard and sheet music as he prepares for the role of manager Ray Toledo, Intimacy gained, he’ll seek access to Segal’s shop keys.
Meanwhile In Nova Scotia, five-year-old prodigy Walter Chamaran gains the attention of Buddhist monks, who seek to bring the boy to their monastery for observation. Walter is the glue that binds the lives of the NYC actors, the upstate thieves, and the car owners. His heroic act unites and reconciles the disparate American cliques with the sublimity of two maxipad-shaped strips of rubberized felt joining to form a tennis ball. A little unity, just what this country needs.
Melvin Podgorski is young, naïve, American - and a coffee fanatic. It’s this passion that leads him from his native Chicago to 1990s Glasgow to scout out the prospects for a US coffee franchise. Looking for an escape from his suffocatingly suburban parents and the tangled wreckage of a divorce, he finds himself floundering in an alien land of Glaswegian dialect and radical student politics. As he becomes increasingly entangled with one particularly charming local and her militant ex-boyfriend, his efforts to keep the past and the present separate are put to the test, and soon his old life in Chicago and his recently found freedom in Glasgow are set for an emotional and catastrophic collision
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Imbued with dark, mournful notes, dashes of warm humour and the bittersweet tang of learning the hard way, Javascotia combines a feel-good flavour with a deep substance.
Adventure story meets epistolary meets an inquiry into the heart of the literary aesthetics in America, The Island asks, as novelist Charles Baxter asked in his 1997 essay “Dysfunctional Narratives (or Mistakes Were Made)”: “What difference does it make to writers of stories if public figures are denying their responsibility for their own actions? So what if the president of the United States is making himself out to be, of all things, a victim?”
This troubled consideration of literary values intersecting with Trumpism sees mainstream trade publishing, literary publishing, through the lens of Baxter’s essay, through Kafka’s The Trial, through Tobias Wolff’s short story “A Bullet in the Brain,” through Rebecca Solnit’s “Keys to the Kingdom: Old Conflicts, New Chapters,” through Uri Berliner’s bold declaration of editorial bias at National Public Radio, through student fictions, through an MFA recommendation letter, and through Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed.
The bibliophile at the center of this kaleidoscopic text retreats to a remote location, leaving his wife and child in hopes of healing his relationship with the thing that’s always mattered most: literature. But when a crate of books is air-dropped to him, a head injury ensues, and his prospects for sailing out of the sea of his own judgements is jeopardized.
In his 2016 memoir Gone With the Mind , Mark Leyner asks what if a book were a third-person shooter game in which you the reader flew in a balcony with Mussolini into the cervix of Leyner’s mother, Muriel, and destroyed the embryonic matter that was his in utero self. In this same spirit, I wish to explore whether a book—specifically a memoir of my life set in the years 2020 and 2021—can take the form of a cross-country journey on a coach bus in which you the reader play card games with my in-laws while traversing the figurative landscape of a writer’s psyche—my psyche—only to arrive, after a perilous journey over lands fraught with disease, perfidy, and narrative control at one of two gatherings: either a cogent, reasoned academic lecture in a university auditorium or a heated political rally in a bleacher-packed sports arena.
Stories with No End
A Bosnian immigrant seeks acceptance through an act of charity. A Midwestern family grows and shrinks across decades, treating addiction through faith and silence. In upstate New York, a construction crew battles conflicting mandates in COVID’s first lockdown order. In Los Angeles, retributive violence feels justified to a call center employee because surveillance technology enables identifying the offender; but consequence isn’t monitored by door cameras. In Connecticut, a man’s fake identity affords him a life of ease, but loneliness and desire blow his cover. The social perils of Christmas threaten to shatter a St. Paul friendship.
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Far from being a right-wing cultural critique, this work intends to pose questions about the role of media in our culture. Why does attention from media signal acceptance and inclusion? What, instead of media attention, could be awarded to the marginalized, to really create economic parity and understanding across class lines? The publishing industry is only indicted by suggestion. There may even be a celebration of sameness, across the many celebrated cultural differences we enjoy in America.
Circumspection is careful consideration of all circumstances and consequences. That’s what these pieces are. “Animals in the Yard” is primary among them, because it concerns the imagination—a preoccupation of mine. People with overactive imaginations know the hazards that daydreaming poses to professions, relationships, and well-being. And they know the richness it affords an otherwise staid life. In the title piece I’m dressing for work in the morning, gathering up those tokens of stature, the corporate ID badge on a lanyard, wallet, phone, keys, etc., when I look out the window to the yard below and leap into a flight of storybook fancy about the neighbor’s dog and a bunny. This moment speaks for the five-year span during which I wrote these pieces, while I worked full-time in publishing, first in Minneapolis, then in New York City.
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