Svein Arber

When Svein Arber—who now lives in Northampton, MA—retired from his longtime position as a lecturer at San Francisco State University, one of his colleagues paid him this tribute: “Call Svein a polymath, and you won’t be exaggerating a bit. A man of many talents, he has been a writer (of a historical baseball novel), cab driver, philosopher (one of his minors at Cornell), an executive in the book publishing world of New York, and even a restaurateur in San Francisco.” One reviewer of the baseball book, "Seasons Past" (co-authored with a fellow writer using the collective pseudonym “Damon Rice”), observed that it enjoys “among sports fiction diehards . . . status as an insider’s baseball cult novel.” Svein earned his M.A. in English Literature at SFSU; his thesis on works by Vladimir Nabokov illuminates the author’s personal demons that lurk within the pages of his most inventive novels. A member of Cornell’s Class of 1959, Svein is proud to be a classmate of two renowned writers of American fiction: Thomas Pynchon and the late Richard Fariña.

In "Jumping to Conclusions," Svein takes us back to New York and San Francisco during the sixties and seventies—a period many readers will remember as the "best of times and the worst of times." Returning to this mind-bending era, we will relive monumental events in America’s history, return to old issues that have never stopped burning, and find ourselves entering settings in both cities that are now lost in time. Early in the story the teller of the tale has a brief encounter with a mystery woman, who, serving as a tried-and-true literary trope, sets the narrative in motion, prompting us to wonder if William Strand can subdue his dark alter ego, which threatens to derail his efforts to conduct his life in a manner that will please his mother who, though dead, lives on in both his conscience and his dreams.