Flight from Ein Sof

Satirical, politically incorrect, irreverent, Flight from Ein Sof is the fictional first-person account of a brief journey to and from a realm of nightmares and insanity. Filled with blistering commentaries on life, free thought, human bestiality and death, this scathing allegory exposes the absurdities and horrors of ideological tyranny, the irrationality of blind faith, the despotism of senseless beliefs and the pointless circularity of the human condition. Revisiting a theme first explored by the author in NOCTURNES – Tales From The Dreamtime, this disquieting and profane opus warns against the ignominy of forced ideas and the false prophets who, to ensnare men's souls, fill their heads with mind-boggling lies. Exulting in polemic and moral disobedience, disquieting and politically charged, NOCTURNES swings dizzyingly between parody and horror, wry humor and paradox. Denouncing predigested notions of life and death, compassion and bestiality, justice and inequity, sanity and psychosis, this thinly veiled allegory casts an acerbic, often savage eye at society's most cherished convictions.

Implicit in this cautionary parable is a haunting but strangely tenable premise: Imagine a realm that spies on dreamers, a social order in which "forbidden" musings, nightmares, chimeras and heretical concepts -- whether seized in one's sleep or evoked in a wakeful state -- are intercepted and wayward dreamers are hunted down and silenced.

The "dreams" woven in NOCTURNES are aimed to stupefy, disconcert. Bent on distracting society from its utilitarian yoke and reconciling irrationality with the rigors of conscious thought, the author argues that knowledge of the world is inextricably shaped and conditioned by the opinions we inherit -- or that we perfunctorily manufacture along the way.

A penchant for deconstructionist philosophy leads the author to argue that the only valid foundation for knowledge is an attitude that, on one hand, rejects "truth" based on blind trust or coerced doctrine ["any truth that owes its existence solely to faith is a lie"], and, on the other, proposes that reality comes directly from our experience of what it is to perceive it ["We are what we think."]

NOCTURNES is literature at its most surreal -- perhaps the storybook equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or an Escher ink drawing that defies the laws of perspective and fools the senses

Anyone requiring booster shots of cynicism, the kind that deliver dreamers from groundless hope, idealists from pointless fancies, will savor W. E. Gutman's new opus. All others, the straitlaced and the faint-of-heart, are enjoined to abstain lest they succumb to its melancholy spell.

From the author of NOCTURNES and FLIGHT FROM EIN SOF. Blending history, art and fiction, THE INVENTOR is an ode to secular humanism and a searing condemnation of religious and political sophistry. Multi-layered, this story-within-a-story revisits crimes committed in the name of God. It also resurrects a largely unknown, sadly neglected medieval painter who, reaching beyond the grave, can now show his face, belie his critics and put an end to speculations about the insights, passions and ordeals that inspired his art. Capturing the horrors his eyes have seen and foreshadowing the upheavals that would rock the world, filled with blistering commentaries on life, free thought, human bestiality and the death of reason, his allegories, now five centuries old, denounce the despotism of absurd beliefs and satirize the pointless circularity of the human condition. "Painting is another way of keeping a diary," Pablo Picasso once said. THE INVENTOR agitates against false prophets who, to ensnare men's souls, fill their heads with mind-boggling lies and often resort to violence to achieve their objectives. In so doing, it also offers another way of prying into a diary's most scandalous secrets.