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The Rules (for the game of life)
That “voice in your head” has something new to tell you.
A novel, a parable, a glimpse into one man’s internal dialog, revealing
unexpected rules from an unverified source. His life is punctuated by tantalizingly
cosmic insights — from God, from an alter ego, or possibly just a big
misunderstanding.
The Rules takes the reader far from the usual homilies and aphorisms into a
surprising existential form of spiritual clarity, where expectations are up-ended,
and theology is boiled down to its essentials.
Notions of “how it works” become intimate and personal, brought down to earth
but at the same time revealed in a quiet grandeur that transcends much of
conventional thinking. The Rules is a light-hearted journey into a new vision of
the sacred permeating the mundane, offering inspiration without sentimentality,
realism without emptiness.
Cave Paintings — Collected Poems
Composer, photographer, installation artist, sculptor, inventor, essayist, and poet,
Allen Cobb has written of his inner and outer experiences for half a century.
This collection reveals the wide variety of styles and idioms of the inner world --
the cave of the human interior. These poems emerge from spaces seen by the
poet through many eyes and many epochs, laced with humor, understanding,
and surprise.
Brain
Frieze:
‘Barnaby
Goes
Home’
and
20
more
stories
of
humor,
mystery, sci-fi, and the mind
Discover diverse worlds of imagination and surprise in these twenty-one new
short stories from the author of "The Rules" and "Cave Paintings." Allen Cobb's
best recent short fiction explores the busy characters of New York City, the
mysteries of life and death, voodoo in New Orleans, an aging motorcycle and its
boomer owner, an extraordinary Doberman, mysterious sleep disturbances, and
a short but sympathetic interview with a zombie.
Cobb's writing style is compelling and literate, and he manages to make the trivial
or absurd unexpectedly fascinating, while handling complex or abstract ideas
(life, death, religion, memory) with ease and clarity. The collection is wonderfully
varied, from extremely short (especially the 11 tiny stories in "Writing in
Restaurants") to the grand entanglements of "16 Degrees of Correlation."
Every story takes the reader someplace new and surprising, yet they all share an
underlying insight into the mysterious and indescribable realms of the mind.