In the 19th Century, folks like Dostoevsky released their novels in a serialized format, once a month over the course of an entire year or more. I’ve decided to do something similar with my own novel, 3Souls, here on Substack. I’ll speed things up for the sake of the restless New World soul, and release a couple chapters each week. For paid supporters, I am offering a personal audio narration of the book. It will include commentary at the end of each release about things like character development and plot and what made me do this instead of that. The written version, without commentary, will be available to all.
This novel, set in New York City in the 1990s, explores the notion of communion. Saint Anthony the Great, the fourth century ascetic, said, “On our neighbor depends life and death. By winning our brother we win God; by offending our brother we sin against Christ.” In writing 3Souls, I wanted to take seriously this life or death admonition to love. I placed human beings together who strove to love in particular ways: zealously, erotically, divinely, politically, violently. As I watched the characters come to life and interact, I learned what it means to love as a father, a mother, and as a neighbor. 3Souls was a multi-year project that I worked on while riding buses in Brooklyn, in teacher work rooms in the Bronx, in tiny church offices in Haiti and on mountains in the Georgian Republic. And it is with great joy that I hand it over to you, the listener, the reader, my neighbor, my friend, and new acquaintance. May we all meet at the table, toasting together to beauty and all of the high things. I hope you enjoy this old school serialization of this ancient uptown love story I’ve come to call 3Souls.
A NOTE
We will begin periodically releasing 3Souls starting March 1st
The novel is told in flashback and from a prison. In print you see the asterisk as a hint that a new conversation from the present has begun. For our listeners, I’ll help contextualize past and present with an audio cue in place of the asterik.