My Fiction

My novel Tongues of Fire is available, free, on this site. Tongues of Fire is a thriller set just before the Second World War. The Nazis believe that they will gain enormous power if they can put together the shards of a universal language that are preserved in the various occult traditions of the world. Our skeptical hero, an American linguistic professor, begins to investigate their plot only because he has been forced into service by a Soviet agent (who is the main female character).

I previously published a novel, Something to Hide (St. Martin's Press, 1995), which is out of print but can be bought used from Amazon for as little as $4.95. Synopsis: "Planning to turn in his dissertation and leave Yale behind, graduate student Zach Blumberg is devastated when his work, a study of an obscure nihilistic French philosopher, mysteriously disappears just before a fellow student is murdered."

From Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1996:

Under pressure to turn in his Yale philosophy dissertation in a month, Zach Blumberg discovers that every disk, every hard copy, even his notes, have vanished. Why would anybody want to stop publication of a thesis on the forgotten reactionary Joseph de Maistre? Desperate, Zach places a personal ad that doesn't answer the question but unearths a similar case: Charles Wilson, a Princeton philosophy student, has lost his dissertation too. Before Zach can compare notes with Wilson, he's disappeared, eventually to turn up an apparent suicide in Arlington. But Charles's friend Kate helps Zach hook the missing theses into a conspiracy that runs from Yale's secret societies to the Supreme Court. ``You really think a few philosophy professors have had any influence on our culture?'' Kate asks at one point. First- novelist Levine, himself a Yale philosophy grad, seems to be courting readers less skeptical than his heroine. The Pelican Brief meets Shelley's Heart, with a dash of Nietzsche and Leo Strauss. The conspiracy is preposterous, the characters wafer-thin, but it's all great diversion for philosophy students looking for distractions from their own work. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

I have also written a continuous, formal, narrative poem of 2,900 lines entitled Entropy. This book has not yet found a publisher, but it was a finalist for the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry competition and one of 25 semifinalists (out of more than 700 entries) to the national Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize in 2000. It can be viewed online. Other verse (and worse) is collected here.