RichEisbrouch - Stories

Nine guys at a summer camp. Eight waiters: Rob, Nate, Brian, Greg, Steve, Dan, Paul, Jim. And a counselor: Andy.

The waiters have a lot of fun in their generous spare time -- the usual camp activities, plus shooting some hoops, playing some cards, and generally messing around. And at least one of them's a joker.

The counselor has other plans, aiming for a different kind of fun. But fun.

The story will serialize on Fridays and Tuesdays, but it may slow to once a week, if I get behind.

Short chapters. Easy reading. Should last into fall. As usual, comments are welcome.

Enjoy.

This is a collection of my short fiction.

It's mostly lightweight and meant to be amusing. Not the stuff of thought-provoking, great literature or college classes. And, often, guys misplace their clothes.

This collection parallels that of my short non-fiction on this site -- Collections.

Enjoy.

This is a collection of my short non-fiction pieces.

It's mostly lightweight stuff, just written to make you smile or laugh.

This collection parallels that of my short fiction on this site -- Circumstances. Also, pretty lightweight.

Enjoy.

Writers make mistakes, especially when writing quickly. Students make mistakes, even when writing slowly. Students writing quickly often make lots of mistakes, and they get unintentionally funny. Here are some of them.

In Germany, it appears there's a whole cult that collects these. In America, we largely have the popular British book Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. This collection follows both of those.

A friendly caution: A little of these goes a long way, so don't try to read them all at once. They get less funny. Very less funny. Far less funny. Oh so less funny. You were warned.

Barnegat Bay is a romance, which starts on the Jersey shore in the summer of 1932. It focuses on its narrator, Doc, and his friends Mike, Larry, Al, and Spence, summer lifeguards soon headed into their senior year at CCNY -- the City College of New York. This is in the uncertain times and job market of the still early years of the Great Depression, just before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. Joining the guys are Mary and Claire, local to the area but no less ambitious for their lives, and in fairly close by New York City, Doc's parents.

It may initially seem an odd book for this site, but, believe me, it's not.

Events on a small New England college campus, following an exceptional one. Gil Andrus and his husband, Pete Sordan, follow through the usual faculty politics and the unexpected mystery. And Don Burris, the detective from The Pendleton Omens, reappears.

Note: this book shares roots and occasionally overlaps with my other book, Quabbin, which is also set in Waldron, Massachusetts, though in a national clothing company. But they're different books with different sensibilities.

The final Book in the Alan Damschroeder series, a fairly straight forward one, with only two characters and the usual lack of clothes.

A couple of young guys in the present try to figure out a mysterious legend from the past.

Meanwhile, some years earlier, a young, Native American wife is being admired by a young warrior from another family, temporarily stranded because of an injury.

And there are bears.

Our dog Molly, with guest appearances by Rocky, her boon companion, and Fluffy, her mentor.

Ben Carleson, an established gay lawyer, deftly juggles a pair of complicated trials. His client: a very nice guy. His opponents: a pair of as-bright lawyers, one a bit more skilled and slicker than the other. The object: justice, as usual.

Two guys and a dog load into a 10-year-old pickup truck and spend two months driving the perimeter of the United States. It doesn't directly show, but over the course of the two months, the narrator falls in love with the driver -- and with the dog.

The continued adventures in sex and friendship, online and off, of Alan Damschroeder, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, high school teacher.

Alan says, "Sometimes I think it takes a triumvirate of saints to keep me out of trouble."

These stories are written as exchanged e-mails and reading this way is an acquired taste. But the first book of this series, Web Guys, has a small, loyal following, so here's the second.

These are the original, annual, New Year's letters that I sent to my friends from 1993 to 2001. That was from two years after I moved into the building to a year-and-a-half after I left.

As mentioned, the letters were the basis for the book, and they often overlap the same material. But they cover more time and more characters, and are sometimes funnier because they're more compressed and somewhat more rude.

Jake's adventures continue in this funny book about the small Los Angeles apartment building he lives in. It's full of hot young people who spend a lot of time nearly naked around the pool. But they're often bonkers.