Sam Eisenstein

Sam Eisenstein is the author of numerous novels and plays including The Inner Garden (Sun & Moon Press 1987), Price of Admission (Sun & Moon Press) and Rectification of Eros: Havana (Green Integer 1999). His stories can also be found in Invisible City, Ribot, Arshile, Penthouse, Seventeen, New York Quarterly, and Prism International. His plays have been produced by the Company Theatre, Hollywood La Mama, KPFK, and Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. Eisenstein is a professor of English and creative writing at Los Angeles City College and he is the current advisor for the Los Angeles City College literary magazine, Citadel. He has also taught creative writing classes at UCLA’s Extension Program and at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Eisenstein graduated from UCLA in 1995 with a PhD in comparative literature. He then traveled to Japan, Gakugei Daigaku, where he was a Fulbright lecturer. In 1973, Eisenstein earned his MA in Psychology from Goodard College and became a licensed marriage and family counselor in 1974. Nudibranchia, Eisenstein’s latest novel, was released Fall 2003. He is currently working on a new novel that ranges from Tierra del Fuego to Oola, Ireland…with numerous mythic points of interest in between.


All Books

Nudibranchia

Sam Eisenstein

Publication Date: October 1, 2003

$13.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 1-888996-75-7

Description:

OUT OF PRINT

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A novel in four voices, bedeviled by one-one line throwaways: ” ..their eyes falling around her like chains, so that she dragged by the time she reached the bathroom…”–this one outrageously about culturally-shamed African-American students taken with Adrianna’s steatopygia, settled on her–an angel required to show her mettle against her twin, a fallen angel–by a seriously bored mischievous deity.

Adrianna defines herself as Charmismatic and Catholic, but Dr Lloyd, one of the lascivious faculty members destined–doomed– to have his life totally shaken by her, jokes about this insult to the “Primate–I don’t mean the monkey, ” while Adrianna ruminates sadly on the Creator’s joke of settling on her butt what she pines to display in front.

A problem for Adrianna’s cover is the Secret-ary, who “just want to squeeze her face up in my bosoms,’ who views Adrianna as a woman of color, but then everybody in this bedlam department perceives her as he or she needs, as her substance goes beyond the flesh.

Dr. Frank, observes, “I served (my country) when sub wasn’t part of a sandwich. He believes the Department is like a submarine coursing silent depths, a kind of ark to keep evil, always lurking, at bay.

Chair–ahh, Chair–utterly lacking reason, he eagerly anticipates abduction by thuggish Tibetan Buddhists, whisked to Potala, Tibet, to be utterly transformed, no longer doomed to umpire vain squabbles among faculty of a dying junior college English department. Sucked into Dr. Lloyd’s filthy office by a teasing offer of the PBS special entitled, “Llamas I have lloved,” humiliated by nagging attachment to things of the flesh, he awaits transmogrification.

Anor, the demon only recently a snake, has horror of actually becoming one of the creatures he impersonates. He tries to strew disorder but chaos is already so pervasive he finds little to do.

Is this a theological thriller disguised as a novel of academia? Is there a difference? What NUDIBRANCHIA has in plenty is a fascination with ideas and their permutations, the transformation of a word leading to an entirely different way of looking at the world.

Sam Eisenstein has published many other novels and a collection of stories, all dealing with confusion of gender, the difficulty of remaining faihful to dream or vision, and the power of the mysterious never-understood authority of the cosmic