Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Let me be direct with you. There is a hole in your life. You have sensed it, a vague, nagging absence, like forgetting to buy toilet paper until the exact moment you need it most. You have tried to fill this hole with meaningful relationships, balanced nutrition, and prestige television. None of it has worked. The hole persists.
The hole is my books. Specifically, the fact that you haven’t read them.
I’ve written three published works, and two novels currently circling the literary stratosphere like buzzards over a particularly promising carcass, waiting for some visionary publisher to look up from their slush pile and recognize that the future of American literature smells faintly of farm animals and existential dread. This is a feature, not a bug.
The Published Works (Or: The Holy Trinity of Dysfunction)
We begin with Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind, which originated as a weekly essay series I wrote for AOL. Yes, that AOL, the one that once mailed you a CD-ROM approximately every four days like a company that had lost a bet. Every week, like clockwork, I delivered a fresh dispatch of chaos to an inbox near you. Did you hear the little voice say “You’ve Got Mail”? That was me. Not Tom Hanks. Not Meg Ryan. No charming Manhattan bookshop, no Nora Ephron third act, no reconciliation in Riverside Park. Just me, a deadline, and an audience that had already clicked past seventeen banner ads to get there. Eventually, the collected essays were bound into a single volume, which is the literary equivalent of taking a long and undignified road trip and then scrapbooking it. The scrapbook is excellent. The road trip was also excellent. You should own this book.
Then there is Not Bukowski, which requires some explanation and also an apology. Not from me, but from every open mic venue that let me near a microphone. Not Bukowski is my stand-up comedy, transcribed into poems, which is either a revolutionary formal innovation or a war crime against both genres simultaneously. The collection also includes transcripts of my conversations with online live chat customer service representatives, covering urgent topics such as: whether LL Bean could customize a tote bag for a friend with three arms (a sincere accessibility inquiry the representative handled with the thousand-yard stare of someone rethinking their career in real time), the correct time of year to plant lightbulbs (I was very serious, they were very confused, nobody won), and step-by-step guidance on cooking a steak in an Easy Bake Oven before a date who was not informed that the kitchen situation was “Easy Bake or nothing.” The steak did not make it. The date, improbably, did.
Also, Bukowski drank more. But I have a pig. I believe this is a wash.
And lastly, released upon an unsuspecting world in November 2025, The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse, a collection of essays that begins with a meditation on the Shopping Cart Taj Mahal of suburban Buffalo and only gets stranger from there.
This is a book containing a wine review dictated via voicemail at 2:47 AM for something called Glass Anus Winery, three revolutionary corn dishes requiring only a magnifying glass and celery salt, a passionate argument that Armless Andy deserves the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame, the complete storied history of Lithuanian Reggae from Vilnius to Babylon, and a meditation on canine supremacy featuring Professor Archibald Pickles. He is a real five-pound dog who is not, as his name implies, a Victorian academic, though the distinction is increasingly unclear. There is also something called Cracker Trouble, the title of which should tell you everything and nothing simultaneously.
This is the book for our moment. This is the book America deserves, though perhaps not the one it was ready for. America was not ready. America needed more time. America did not get more time.
The Novels (Or: Two Masterworks Trapped in the Amber of Publishing Timelines)
Truth Tastes Like Pennies features a synesthetic ex-FBI agent named Trout Bowman who can taste lies, which, in the current political climate, means he is essentially drowning in loose change. He is joined by Brandy, an efficiency consultant, Timothy Splashinski (janitor, philosopher, load-bearing character), and two government-enhanced otters named Olive and Otis who are, without question, the most competent intelligence operatives in the entire federal apparatus. This is satire. This is also, increasingly, journalism. I am not comfortable with how fast reality is catching up.
Elliot Nessie is a noir detective novel set in Dubuque, Iowa, starring Vinny Vidivici, a detective who specializes in helping cryptids navigate a world that is not particularly designed with them in mind. Word gets around, as it tends to do, and eventually the caseload includes a visit from the Loch Ness Monster herself, who has traveled a considerable distance from Scotland to Dubuque, Iowa, which tells you everything you need to know about how desperate things have gotten. If you have ever wanted to read Raymond Chandler as reimagined by someone who genuinely cares about the emotional interior lives of lake monsters, this is the only book in the history of literature that meets that description. I checked.
Both novels are in submission, which is a polite way of saying that the greatest literature of our generation is currently being evaluated by people with very full inboxes, and the fate of American satire rests entirely on whether someone had a good lunch.
In the meantime, because I am a man of the people (specifically, the people willing to hand over a small monthly fee in exchange for the privilege), I am considering releasing chapters of both novels to paid subscribers on my Substack. That’s right. For what amounts to slightly less than a mediocre gas station sandwich, you could be reading unpublished fiction from an author whose pig has more integrity than most sitting senators. Each month. Like a literary advent calendar, except instead of chocolate, it’s existential dread and government otters. You will not find a better deal in American publishing. You will arguably not find a better deal anywhere. I have checked the price of gas station sandwiches. I stand behind this comparison completely.
Free subscribers will receive my eternal gratitude, which is worth approximately what you paid for it. Paid subscribers will receive the chapters, the gratitude, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing they are the reason this whole thing doesn’t collapse into a pile of unsolicited query letters and pig-related despair.
Subscribe. You’ve already come this far. The hole in your life has a PayPal button now.
Why You Need to Read All of This Immediately
Let me appeal to your self-interest. The world is a lot right now. It is loud and strange and the otters running things are real (what??) and they are not charming like Olive and Otis. In times like these, you have two options: despair, or read something so aggressively funny that despair doesn’t have room to park.
I have lived on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a pig named Trouble McFussbucket, a chihuahua named Señor Hector “Queso” Suarez DDS, a cat named Vinny Van Meow, a blind dog named Remmi, and a five-pound dog my wife calls “Dipshidiot” with a frequency that suggests genuine affection. I have moved more than thirty times. I have written television promos for networks you no longer remember. I have a stand-up background, a bad left ear, and deeply complicated feelings about cornhole.
What I am saying is that I have done the research. I have lived in the source material. And I have turned that source material into books that will make you laugh until you feel something, and then feel something until you laugh again, which is, ultimately, all any of us can hope for.
The hole in your life is a Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)-shaped hole.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Packing for Marrakech, Distracted by Fried Chicken Fashion - April 20, 2026
- I Am Not a Carwash Guy Either - April 17, 2026
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
