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BUSH PIGS

(for Lahai Hindowa)

Short Fiction By

Richard Dooling

©1994

Originally published in The New Yorker

(Read online below, or download and print:
a plain print PDF - 180 kb; or
a decorative e-book - 474 kb.)

It’s not easy coming back to this country. It’s not like any other country in the world. Most of you don’t know that, because you live here, and you’ve never been anywhere else, except maybe the Caribbean, which is like a big beach, or Europe, which is like going to an old museum. Europeans sit at tables with knives and forks. They have beds and sheets, toilets and garbage cans. Africa is different. The expatriates there will tell you that the reverse culture shock of coming back to America can be worse than the shock of going Third World in the first place.

For three years I was in the Peace Corps, and I lived in a village in the south of Sierra Leone, West Africa. I’d like to say that I stayed so long because the villagers needed me, but that would be a lie. I owed a lot on my college loans, I heard that jobs back home were scarce, I didn’t want to go to law school, a certain village girl prepared my meals for me and took care of me in other ways, and for a long time a couple of diamond diggers and I were smoking the very best Nigerian jamba every night and listening to Bob Marley and Lucky Dube, King Sunny Ade and Johnny Clegg Savuka. Time passed. I used to drink with a white missionary at Sulima Beach—twenty minutes by footpath and the most beautiful place in the world. One night we laughed over beers about how a local witch-finder had put a swear on him. Four days later his body washed up on the beach in front of the thatched baffa where we had watched the sun set.

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Dooling Fiction | 4 Comments »

A Novel by Richard Dooling

Read the first chapter of The Journals of Eleanor Druse at Amazon.

I wrote this book as a tie-in to the Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital project.

Eleanor Druse, inspired by the original character from Lars Von Trier’s mini-series and played by Diane Ladd in our version, was a delightful voice to inhabit during the months before Kingdom Hospital aired.

The project also enabled me to investigate the abundant literature on out-of-body and near-death experiences and to investigate the “land in between,” or “Swedenborgian space,” as Sally Druse so loved to call it.

The Journals is a prequel to Kingdom Hospital. If you peruse the Amazon reviews, you’ll see that some readers are bothered by this, but most don’t seem to mind. The novel is a prelude to the series, yes, but it works by itself, too.

Eleanor Druse | No Comments »

Short Fiction by Richard Dooling

Diary Of An Immortal Man was a cover story for Esquire Magazine and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. The full text appears online at Kurzweil AI.

Diary Of An Immortal Man is kinky science fiction and black comedy, inspired in part by Ray Kurzweil’s tremendous book, The Age Of Spiritual Machines; both speculate about what the future holds for us and our biotech lust for immortality.

If you are a technology addict and haven’t tried Ray Kurzweil’s site, don’t go there until you have four or five hours to spare: KurzweilAI.

You will also find free samples of Ray’s new book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Dooling Fiction, Geekophilia | 2 Comments »

A Novel by Richard Dooling

New York Times Notable Book of 2002

Read the first chapter of Bet Your Life at the New York Times site.

Set in Omaha, Nebraska, the author’s hometown, Bet Your Life turns the death of Lenny Stillmach–a young insurance investigator, a scam buster who may have been a scam artist himself–into a sexy, techno-literary exploration of fraud, murder, and the mysteries of the human soul.

Bet Your Life is an homage to James M. Cain–The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity–classic insurance-murder mysteries bound up with love stories.

Review Excerpts For Bet Your Life

“A Techno Update for a femme fatale and a fall guy,” Janet Maslin, Daily New York Times

“This is the kind of book that keeps you reading all night.” Paul MacEnulty, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“Nebraska noir . . .” Mark Costello, Sunday NYTimes Book Review

“Humor, wit and suspense. Dooling’s Web-savvy characters are startlingly realistic: They shock, amuse, frustrate and refuse to behave. His descriptions are breathtaking and crystal-clear.” Marc Flores, USA Today

Dooling Fiction, Bet Your Life | No Comments »

Short Fiction by Richard Dooling

Bush Pigs, a short story by Richard Dooling, is now available on an audio CD-ROM from Amazon.

Originally published in The New Yorker, Bush Pigs is a cult favorite of returned Peace Corps volunteers, or anyone else suffering from “reverse culture shock.”

Actor Mark Nelson performed Bush Pigs live in New York City at Symphony Space as part of the renowned Selected Shorts program. The reading has since been featured on NPR stations across the country as part of the Selected Shorts broadcast and is now available for purchase on Amazon and at Symphony Space.

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A Novel by Richard Dooling

Read Chapter One of Brain Storm

New York Times Notable Book of 1998

Amazon Hot 100 Bestseller

Review Excerpts

“Dooling’s new book is a brilliant concoction, flashing with comedic and intellectual energy . . . . an inspired piece of work, a caustically funny, antic diatribe with a tightly woven criminal intrigue at its narrational heart.”– Richard Bernstein, New York Times

“This thriller can’t easily be subcategorized because it is, among other things, a defense of free speech, a whodunit, a speculation about the way cognitive neuroscience is changing our perception of crime, a satirical portrait of the legal profession, a sex romp, a de facto essay on language and, by no means least, a comedy. This book is packed.”– Colin Harrison, Sunday New York Times

“Hilarious . . . subtle, entertaining . . . a serious novel of ideas.” — George Will, Washington Post

I researched and wrote Brain Storm in the mid-1990s, during the Decade of the Brain, when neuroscience was just catching fire. Good books on neuroscience came out at least once a month, even then. Now they come out once a week!

First, a sampling of the ones I read while I was writing Brain Storm:

Brain Storm Background Books:

• Consciousness Explained, By Daniel Dennett;
• The Engine Of Reason, The Seat Of The Soul, By Paul Churchland;
• Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, By Antonio Damasio.

Hundreds of brain books have come out since Brain Storm was published in 1998. Some of these great books would have saved me a ton of research. These are my favorites.

Good post-Brain Storm books:

• How The Mind Works, By Steven Pinker;
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes;
• Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V.S. Ramachandran.

Brain Storm, Dooling Fiction, Neuroscience | 2 Comments »

A Novel by Richard Dooling

1994 National Book Award Finalist

New York Times Notable Book of 1994

Read Chapter One of White Man’s Grave

Review Excerpts

“A bravura display of satire . . . Dooling evokes the humane checks and balances of a deep world: the logic, you might say, of its magic.”– Richard Eder, L.A. Times.

“The book is absolutely astonishing; I am a Richard Dooling fan for life.”–Phillip M. Margolin, author of Gone, But Not Forgotten and After Dark.

I spent seven months in Sierra Leone in the early 1980s and thoroughly researched everything I’d heard about over there. Unfortunately the books I used are found only in libraries.

White Man’s Grave Background Books:

• The Mende Of Sierra Leone, By Kenneth Little;
• Mende Religion, By Anthony Gittins;
• The Springs Of Mende Conduct and Belief, By Harris Sawyerr.

Dooling Fiction, White Man's Grave | 16 Comments »

A Novel by Richard Dooling

Use Amazon’s “Search Inside The Books” feature to read chapter one of Critical Care.

Review Excerpts

“A sardonic, often harrowing look at the American way of life-support.”–Kirkus Reviews

“A bitter and disturbing, though often very funny, first novel with a sensibility that Dr. Strangelove fans will recognize.” — Beryl Benderly, Washington Post Book World.

“A scathingly funny black comedy … almost impossible to put down.” –Harper Barnes, St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Critical Care was also a major motion picture directed by Sidney Lumet, starring James Spader, Albert Brooks, Helen Mirren, Kyra Sedgwick, and Anne Bancroft. Producer and screenwriter, Steven Schwartz, adapted Critical Care for the big screen.

Critical Care Background Books

• The House Of God, by Samuel Shem
• First, Do No Harm, by Lisa Belkin

Critical Care | No Comments »