Dennis Littrell

I've been a soldier, a newspaper reporter, a poker professional, a stock market amateur, a high school English teacher, but primarily I’ve been a writer.

My Books

I believe the best book I ever wrote is Yoga: Sacred and Profane (Beyond Hatha Yoga). The second best is The World Is Not as We Think It Is. The yoga book was written over something like three decades beginning sporadically in the 1980s and finished in 2010. It’s a book I lived through practice and study starting in 1973 when I did my first headstand.

The book about the illusionary nature of our existence which I will refer to simply as “The World” I wrote mostly during this century relying on all the reading I had done in various scientific disciplines, in addition to innumerable email exchanges with interested people. I finished the book in 2011. The theme of the book comes from a lyric in Bob Dylan’s song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “Look out kid/They keep it all hid.”

They do indeed—if they can, “they” being the powers that be.

I’ll give the complete list of my published books according to genre and then say a bit about them.

Fiction

A Perfectly Natural Act

High School from Hell

Let’s Play Overkill: Selected Stories

Love with Anorexics

Teddy and Teri

The Holon

Poetry

Like a Tsunami Headed for Hilo: Selected Poems

Review Collections

Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can’t Believe I Swallowed the Remote

Dennis Littrell’s Funniest! Most Satirical! and Just Plain Meanest! Reviews

Dennis Littrell's True Crime Companion: Reviews of Some of the Best True Crime Books Ever Penned With Updates

Hard Science and the Unknowable

I Think We Survived the Nightmare: Political, Social and Economic Reviews

Novels and Other Fictions: reviews by Dennis Littrell

Understanding Evolution and Ourselves

Understanding Religion: Reviews, Essays and Commentary

Nonfiction

How to Win at Hearts on Your Computer: Beat the Bots in Apps and on the Web

The World Is Not as We Think It Is

Yoga: Sacred and Profane (Beyond Hatha Yoga)

Notes:

The first of my published works, my novel, A Perfectly Natural Act, was published by G.P. Putnam’s in 1973 and brought out in paperback by Pinnacle the following year. The “Perfectly Natural” refers ironically to rape by my anti-heroic protagonist. The manuscript title of this short, ironic, comédie noire (not to be confused with film noir) novel was “The Invisible Man.” My protagonist, John Schofield, a young high school English teacher, suffers from what he perceives as his being dominated by sexuality and his need to have sex with women. That is the theme more or less: sexuality controls us to a greater extent than we like to believe. And John Schofield did not like to be controlled.

A sidenote: the movie production company, First Artists, was looking at the novel with a view to taking out an option on it when they went into a reorganization (or something like that). I thought for the right director APNA would be a very interesting story to be filmed partly because of the ambiguity about how real or how metaphoric was Schofield’s invisibility.

I wrote most of APNA in 1971 while working for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey.

High School from Hell is essentially the same novel as Love with Anorexics. I put in more time trying to get this novel right than I have for any of my other works. The problem, as I now understand it, is that I was not able to achieve enough distance from my subject matter to be objective. The novel is partly autobiographical. I needed to give my protagonist a few more flaws while showing that in some respects he was heroic. Nonetheless this novel contains some of my best writing. It’s too long and rambles around a bit too much. Additionally I use several different narrative techniques which might confuse or annoy some readers.

In addition to spending a lot of time writing this novel I also spent untold hours in the late 1990s trying to find royalty publication for it. There was some interest and some effort on the part of some agents to find a home for it but to no avail. I was advised to cut it considerably and concentrate on the part of the novel which had to do with the tragic dying and death of the protagonist’s wife. I couldn’t or wouldn’t rewrite it, and finally I moved on to other works.

Let’s Play Overkill: Selected Stories

I’ve written about 40 stories in my life. Here are 13 of the best. I believe. It’s hard to be objective so I could say that these 13 are my favorites or perhaps they are my favorites of those stories that I think people would like. One of the stories won a prize in a literary contest. Another appeared in the now defunct magazine Smoke for which I got something like $1,200. Some of the stories not in this collection are probably as good. I was going to put out a second collection but I somehow lost two of my stories. I was about to digitize them but somehow they disappeared. Writers lose manuscripts. Hemingway, if I recall correctly, lost one of his novels.

In many ways Teddy and Teri is the most commercial of my novels. It is well written, well-plotted with interesting characters and realistic dialogue. I never tried to sell it because the theme (love between a father and daughter, although not incestuous per se) was a bit ahead of its time and still is for that matter. I thought I handled it rather well.

The Holon is frankly not so good. It’s a bit derivative of many science fiction ideas from the first part of the twentieth century which I had innocently imbibed. The characters are not interesting for the most part and the tension in the story is slight. I thought this was a good novel when I wrote it forty years ago but I’ve changed my mind.

My poetry collection, Like a Tsunami Headed for Hilo: Selected Poems, contains several poems that I think are actually good, but most of the rest is pretty ordinary or even “bad.” The best poem is probably “The Phoenix of a Singular Fire.” I also like “Beyond the Solar Wind: Let Us Be Modest” and “The player at Sidewinder Road returning from Las Vegas.” My technique (if you could call it that) is use rhythm and rhyme in a non-disciplined manner and to celebrate ideas with sharp juxtapositions. Most of these poems were written in the 1980s and 1990s.

My review collections are more than just reviews. I organized them into eight books and in each book are several chapters. There is an introduction to each book and in some cases as an afterword. Each chapter has its introduction and again in some cases an afterword. The best of these, according to sales, is Dennis Littrell's True Crime Companion: Reviews of Some of the Best True Crime Books Ever Penned With Updates. Well, the most commercial. As far as critical review goes Understanding Evolution and Ourselves is the best book, and it really is a tour de force of a kind. Reading that book would be about as good an introduction to biological evolution as you could get outside of a graduate program at a university. I’ve been interested in evolution since I was a teenager and have read…well the bibliography cites 95 books on evolution. I’ve read others as well as many, many magazine articles and even a few from peer review journals, and of course watched nearly every nature documentary presented on TV over the years

The true crime book covers not only sensational and famous cases such as the JonBenét Ramsey tragedy, the Scott Peterson murders, the Jeffrey MacDonald family murders, but also chapters on “The Satanic Sexual Abuse of Children?” (note the question mark), white collar and Internet crime, corporate greed, the “war” on drugs, etc. There are fifty books covered and about the same number of cases.

My movie review book, Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can’t Believe I Swallowed the Remote, concentrates on movie classics, Academy Award winners, foreign relationship movies while skipping most of the slasher, sword and fantasy, and hard core action movies popular today. I have lists of my favorite actors, directors, writers, documentaries and even a movie quiz. Over 500 movies are reviewed, most of them in some depth. (The book contains over 350,000 words.)

Hard Science and the Unknowable is also a collection of reviews dealing with popular books on a variety of subjects ranging from cosmology and astronomy to physics and mathematics to pseudoscience, metaphysical science, SETI and the alien and UFO phenomena. “The value” of the book, as I put it in the Introduction, “and the primary reason for publishing it, is not so much in pointing to and evaluating various good and not so good books on hard and speculative science, but in providing an introduction to the wide-ranging and fascinating subject relating to the cosmos and our place in it.”

What I mainly do in I Think We Survived the Nightmare: Political, Social and Economic Reviews is celebrate books bashing George W. Bush and his administration for the innumerable stupidities they committed during his time in the White House, most especially the senseless and horrible invasion of Iraq. I also take on “Rethuglicons” in general, “Democracy by Capitalism,” “Cultural Wars,” and “The Coming Energy Crisis: Food and Water Shortages, Pollution, and Climate Change.” Here’s how I introduce the book:

Let me put my cards on the table, face up. These reviews of books on a variety of subjects related to politics, economics and social issues during the first decade of the 21st century represent my position as a person left of center politically, right of center economically and as an unabashed social liberal.

I want the drug war ended and street drugs taxed and regulated. I want the United States to use its military power less and its “soft power”—economic, political, and diplomatic—more. I want corporations too big to fail to be broken up into corporations that can’t be assured of government welfare should they fail.

This is a substantial book, over a hundred thousand words long covering over a hundred titles.

In Novels and Other Fictions I review great and not so great novels, short story collections and plays written by such literary luminaries as Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Golding, Knut Hamsun, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hesse, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alberto Moravia, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Voltaire, and many others. Popular and/or contemporary artists include, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Tracy Chevalier, Richard Flanagan, Jonathan Franzen, Arthur Golden, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Joy Williams and others.

In the introduction I wrote in part:

As a reviewer I get a lot of novels sent to me even though I turn down most requests for reviews. Most of the novels I receive are overwritten and self-indulgent. Usually they are also short on artistic talent. Everybody seems to think they have a novel in them (as the old saw has it). They don’t. A real novelist is an artist who understands the needs of the reader, who understands that a novel is in part a communication between writer and reader and that the writer is not to waste the reader’s time. Entertainment is a fine reason to write a novel of course, but a greater purpose is to enlighten, to inform, and to share a view about the meaning and experience of life. Furthermore, a literary artist must make some effort at beauty, even if it is a twisted beauty. And above all a novelist must tell the truth, the psychological and literary truth. That’s hard to do.

Understanding Religion: Reviews, Essays and Commentary is mostly about Eastern religions and favors books that have guided me over many decades of study. Again this is a long book, over 120,000 words with chapters on Hinduism, Buddhism and Zen, Daoism, and Eastern Religions in General. There are four appendices, one entitled “Why Your God Probably Doesn’t Exist.” I even rank the major religions according to my preference.

Here are the first two paragraphs of my introduction:

This is not a book about the rituals and practices of religions. This is instead a book about the ideas and the psychology of religions. From my perspective religions are best understood as psychologies, and until the modern era they were the best psychologies available and in some ways they still are, properly understood. A religion after all is a way of life that attempts to guide and instruct from cradle to grave on how to live in harmony with the known and the unknown.

In view of the fact that organized religions are primarily social and political entities this book sees religion from a secular point of view. My position is that no single religion has a monopoly on religious truth but some religions are more agreeable from a spiritual and humanistic point of view than others. After reading this book the reader will have no doubt about which I prefer and which I think are not so good. The emphasis is on Eastern religions and on various ways of understanding the phenomenon of God and spirituality.

Finally let me write a few words about How to Win at Hearts on Your Computer: Beat the Bots in Apps and on the Web. I have always had a keen interest in games. In my twenties I was an Expert chess player (and I’m still pretty good). I played professional poker for many years, and I have killed innumerable hours playing solitaire and hearts on my computer. (Alas.) After many hours of beating or not beating the bots in hearts I thought for a lark I would write a book on how to get the advantage.

This book definitely will improve your play, but I want to make it clear that this book is about beating heart-playing programs on the Web or on your computer. Beating human opponents is a different matter mainly because of the psychological element in the game.

My hobbies include reading and writing in a variety of subject areas, vegetable gardening, cooking, birding, chess, fine wines, and foraging for and processing wild and "escaped" foods such as figs, olives, pine nuts, acorns, wild grapes and wild peas. I practice yoga and until seven months ago ran three miles every second or third day. When I was younger I played pickup basketball all over the South Bay in the Los Angeles area.

I was graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a major in political science and a minor in English.

I am widowed and currently live on a one-acre property 3,000 feet up the side of the Haleakala volcano on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands where I are learning a lot about trees, especially fruit and nut trees. I have a daughter and two grandsons.

Contact me at dalittrell@yahoo.com or visit my blog at dennislittrell.com.