In this short fiction Los Angeles writer Martin Nakell explores various ideas, philosophical and practical, about an entire library of books - how to classify them, how to order them, their bindings, their markings, and what their being within the same library means, how they "communicate" with one another - all of which helps to reveal the personality and mind of their owner Thomas Rivka. Suggesting other such fictions by figures from J. K. Huysmans to Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Thomas Rivka is an absurdly humorous work - the collector even refuses to read his books - exploring and revealing what knowledge and the containers of that knowledge mean in the human experience.

The Library of Thomas Rivka (New American Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Nakell, Martin

United States

Sun & Moon Press

Martin Nakell's new fiction releases our understanding of the novel form as well as the form of cities and collective imagination into a kaleidoscope of responsibility. We who are hard pressed to re-evaluate our works and lives will thank Mr. Nakell for so aptly preparing the way.

Settlement

Contemporary

Spuyten Duyvil

“Am I inside the poem?” asks Monk, narrator of Nakell’s new novel. Each and every gesture, every advance this questing Monk makes, involves itself in a grammar of growing awareness. Monk’s achievements may seem inconsequential to a reader outside 12th c. Asian monasteries and retreats Monk wanders amongst, yet through the performances and interactivities of their inhabitants, their subjected-to status emerges as an embodiment of clearer subjectivity. Monk symbolizes commitment to a world shorn of its responsibilities by a commanding objectivity where certainty may by itself assert the final lone question: “Had I become so sick as I had become in order to nurture the idea of healing?”

Monk

Genre Fiction

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

1200 kilometers into and then … back out of an avowed enemy’s territory. A nuclear facility that could explode into a nuclear holocaust upon its destruction. Why even attempt such a mission? 
 By 1979, Saddam Hussein was in the throes of developing a nuclear bomb at a plant called Osiraq, 12 kilometers south of Baghdad. With this bomb Saddam vowed to destroy Israel. The world stood deaf to Israel’s pleas. Israel’s major allies believed Saddam’s nuclear ambitions peaceful, or they simply supported Saddam as a counter-power to Iranian aggression, a chess-piece on a larger game-board. Annihilation, however, presents itself much larger than global politics. 
 In The Lord of Silence, a thrilling espionage and adventure novel, focused as much on the people involved in such danger as on human history—taking global politics as much as the state of Israel and her leaders for plot and intrigue and unfolding the ins and outs of nuclear terror—Martin Nakell manages to steady his story-telling hand in a patient examination of the events of a true-life Nuclear Showdown. Mission Impossible, 24 … yet, unlike the over-technological fantasies projected by uber-patriotic narration, The Lord of Silence focuses on and explores the American genius and ingenuity of new weapons and military preparation that aided Israel. 
 With risky intelligence gathering inside the very heart of Saddam’s Iraq, with diplomatic and military strategy sessions in Jerusalem, with intensive training in the United States, at great personal sacrifice, dedication, and above all courage, Israel carried out one of the world’s great acts of detonation. Purpose, urgency, and an inescapable necessity for action changed the world. Now, it reminds us of the legacy of such fortitude in the face of even newer nuclear challenges—Iran, for one. In reality, the story of The Lord of Silence is not over.

The Lord of Silence

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

IS Several forms of language – poetry, prose, dialogue, essay, opera – take shape in Is. Once we use language with imagination, the definitions/constrictions of traditional form fall away. All writing = all writing. The Chaos Theory of Literary Composition puts it this way: art is energy. To achieve chaos, which releases energy, the writer subjects the writing to heat {in the Chaos Theory of physics, that heat is literal, i.e. fire), i.e., passion, intuition, defamilarization, disruption of syntax, style, genre, spontaneity, the unreal, the unexpected, etc. etc. etc. That state of chaos reveals new form, that chaos opens fissures along which the energy travels and along which the reader engages that energy. IS, putatively the passive verb, includes in it all that is, all the energy we, as artists, bring to the work. Yet, IS, as what we call the passive verb, is a fiction. Like zero in mathematics, the “is” in our work, in the title to this book, isness, does not exist in the real world, but it functions to make everything else work. There is no object – no noun – no thing – that does nothing, that is not an action. Action = energy. Art is energy. The title IS references this nothing which is not, and this – every word – every world – every thing which is, the action inherent in being, including the heat that creates chaos that reveals new form.

Domantey, Paige

Carman, Jane L

Poetry

Lit Fest Press / Festival of Language

&gt;p&gt;The Library of Thomas Rivka is an impressive and incredibly engaging book! Nakell’s fiction is an equal complement to his poetry. Robert Creeley 
Nakell has achieved something that is nearly impossible and would likely be disastrous if undertaken by a less skilled writer…to create a unique and ground-breaking work of literature…celebrating…every Human’s primal urge to create something from nothing. Angela Genusa, Mad Hatter’s Review
Like Calvino’s Marco Polo waanderingwandering to the invisible cities of the imaginary Mongol Empire, our Monk discovers that every amazing place he goes is only and always a gateway to the next amazing place. Nakell has succeeded in getting closer to, as Henry Miller put it, “the heart of the truth, which I suppose is the ultimate aim of the writer, in the measure that he ceases to struggle.” Stuart Metranga, The Believer

A History of Zero: & Alter Fictions

Literary

Martin Nakell takes us on a fascinating journey....And in this journey Nakell makes us see things we have never seen before: 'without this desert everyone would die of thirst....[R]eminiscent of some of the best compositions by Philip Glass....the poem's...passages impart the sensation of negative space; they vanish into meaning.

consciousness

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