My Publications
My writing projects are extensive and encompass research, criticism, education, and fiction. My current and future publications are presented below.
2023
Critic at Large
This newsletter is a weekly look at cultural creations — literature, art, film, music, etc. — old and new. Each week I examine a particular work and discuss its artistic and creative value. My aim with each post is to illuminate cultural works, especially ancient and/or obscure creations, worth experiencing.
2023
The Rules of Persuasion
From Homer to Shakespeare, from Magritte to Rothko, from Bach to Rakim, The Rules of Persuasion uncovers insights and concepts, some of them secret and powerful, that will fundamentally alter how you think about persuasion. In the end, my goal is to help you understand how these insights can make you a thoughtful and persuasive communicator in almost any setting in which you may find yourself.
2024
My Leaf and I
In June of 2022, my son Enzo, who had just completed his first year of journalism school at the University of Maryland, was killed in a bicycling accident. In the year that followed his death, I kept an online journal that chronicled the road I traveled after losing my son. That story of loss, sorrow, and, ultimately, peace is contained in this volume.
2024
The Long Eclipse
In the 1970s and 80s, Italy lived through an intensely brutal war to control the emerging heroin trade that plunged the nation into chaos and almost destroyed it. In the midst of this constant violence and death, Magistrate Paolo Borromeo risks everything to battle the unseen forces of organized crime tearing the nation apart. Inspired, and based on, the life of legendary Italian prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, The Long Eclipse tells the moving, and heroic, story of Borromeo, his wife Anna, and the men and women on both sides of this epic struggle for the soul of a nation.
2025
Eight Below Zero
Eight Below Zero tells the story of the secret trials of an inner circle of eight ministers and generals after the death of the dictator they served for three decades. Set in an unnamed country, it is an examination of the allure of tyranny and the forces that corrupt those who give anything to hold and keep power.