The Zen Follies, by Fil Lewitt, with plenty of B & W photos and drawings of zenbos, oddballs, and unusual locations, takes a close, sometimes ironic and often funny look at the business and pleasures of Zen Buddhism, and tells through stories, essays, autobiography, and some poetry the path one person took to find the Way, and what happened along the way. The book is aimed at the general reader with no special knowledge of Zen. Lewitt has been practicing Zen Buddhist meditation for more than forty years, and now in his 70th year, was ready to write about it. He spent 1972 as a student/monk at...

Molly Bender, new to the Santa Fe Police Department, has to join Special Agent Wink Hoodle of the FBI in a task force to investigate strange doings at Guru Ram's religious cult, the sky-blue-robed Jebudindu, in nearby Barsalona, New Mexico. With her new friend Harry Fine, an ex-newspaperman who now writes a nasty advice-to-the-lovelorn column under the name of Miz Tingle, Molly moves out to join the ashram as an undercover agent, where she meets the rabid Ma Lisha, pistol-packing chief assistant to charismatic, handsome Guru Ram; and 16-year-old Angel Cruz, a member of the twelve remaining...

At St. Mello's College in Santa Fe, the egghead mainly-male faculty who teach the Great Books List curriculum are dying, one each month, in horrible accidents. The college administration and the local police are satisfied with that verdict, but new Writing Tutor Jack Nowan isn't. At 35, with a fresh-minted Ph.D. and his first university job, he's on the bottom rung. With the help of the cool and lovely Mercy Torcher, the Egyptian-eyed Assistant Director of Admissions and Relations, and Artemisia Parse, a retired lady professor from England, East Coast transplant Jack Nowan slowly realizes...

San Francisco, 1967. Tough guy Morry Twych, with his brother Dicky and friend Moosy, has some years previously invented "porno" to replace the old burlesque. They run a successful "theater" downtown. Graduate student Will Rymer has been drafted by the Chicano members of PUS-People Under Slumlords-to be their honky negotiator with the slumlord, a downtown lawyer named Berlitzer. The suave Byron Berlitzer, aka Sleekman, also owns the property where the Twych Brothers operate their theater, and wants a piece of the action. All five men are involved with, maybe even in love with, the gorgeous Li...

In the grand tradition of "My Secret Life" and Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn," this palimpsest of a book, woven into a narrative from the secret journals of more than fifty years of the life of Bill Dingel, becomes a picaresque, or episodic, romance that shows a man who is a lover, not an abuser, of women, girls, boys and even ladyboys, as he moves through the east coast of America of the 50s and the west coast in San Francisco of the 60s, and then through Asia as well, in the 70s through the 90s, finding love and lovers in his own inimitable style. The book is...

"Canyon Wren's Rag," under the imprint of Fictional Enterprises, brings together 276 poems, containing fifty years, 1960-2010, of the selected poems of Fil Lewitt, accompanied by some of his drawings. It is the COMPANION VOLUME to "The Zen Follies" (2010), which is an illustrated, non-fiction, mostly prose book of autobiography, stories, tales, aphorisms, and essays about one man's journey into American Zen Buddhism. "Canyon Wren's Rag" is in some sense more of the same, but all in poetry, a medium in which Fil Lewitt has been working steadily since the age of fourteen, not a medium that can...

A vicious crime in the gay Castro District of San Francisco, unsolved by the SFPD, results in the hiring of Mercy Investigations to find the perpetrator. At the same time, US Senator Ruth Fineline is trying to help her grand-niece get out of an abusive and miserable marriage without creating a public spectacle. This second Mercy Investigations novel brings back the agency's crew of four - Steady Ed Steadman, Mercy Torcher, Jack Nowan, and young Reggie Jackson - in a rolling, startling novel of action and intrigue, another outing that contains wit and intelligence as well as the serious...

In this third novel of the Mercy Investigations series, REVENGE, set in San Francisco, the founder of the original agency, Steady Ed Steadman, tells the story of a murderous maniac, Ort Baggett, who was released by mistake from prison and intends to get revenge on the man who put him there, Ed Steadman, by murdering him. Meanwhile, in the sub-plots that always show up in this series, young buff black Reggie Jackson, their resident computer expert, is trying to protect lovely Lola Lopez, who works upstairs for La Raza, from a couple of Hispanic gangbangers who are seriously hassling her. Ed is...