Richard Crasta, Author

Excerpts from I Will Not Go the F**k to Sleep (daddies & kids, multifaceted book of humor and satire)  I: From "What You Don't Know about Bangaloring" (satire on outsourcing) Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Great Hamburger Cowboy Nation of America: There is no need to introduce myself. You know me and my entire family already. Because my eighteen brothers and sisters, bred and currently breeding like rabbits in Bangalore, have all taken your jobs (alternative pronunciation: yer jaorbs?). What’s more, you have spoken to one or more of us. Remember Sue (Sushmita) at AT&T, Kelli (Kalyani) at Walmart Customer Service, Billy (Balwant) from AOL, Jake (Jayakrishnan) from Citibank Visa, Victor (Vikas) from Microsoft Tech Support, Neil (Neelakanta) from HP Customer Support, Vicki (Vikram Bandit) from Citibank Credit Default Swap Investments, John S. Warren (Jnaneswaran) of the Legal Support Hotline, Biff (Bhimaiah, wow, that was a ...

From The Killing of an Author:    As a matter of principle, it is important to preserve uncompromising writers like me, because as Tom Hayden says in How to Save the World (a quote I picked up on the Internet): “You can’t break the cycle of poverty; you can’t break the cycle of violence; you can’t break the cycle of corporate expansion; you can’t break the cycle of the arms race; you can’t break the cycle of imprisonment, if you don’t break the cycle by which radicals are isolated, idealists are turned into pragmatists, and pragmatists into opportunists.” Isolated, fatwahed, starved, and broken. Yes, you need to protect the writers who would, as Bill Clinton said of Bob Dylan, disturb the peace and discomfort the powerful. The Killing of an Author also contains this appeal to Sonny Mehta, President of Knopf, who had praised my novel "The Revised Kama Sutra" in glowing terms, and according to Harriet Wasserman, had offered to publish it, an...

THE REVISED KAMA SUTRA has been published in 10 countries and was called "very funny" by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a big book, and many of the most energetic and exuberant passages occur after the first 50 to 70 pages. In this passage, Vijay, the protagonist, is around 16 years old and has just made his first (unsuccessful) attempt to lose his cherry with a hooker: Chapter 10 How to Succeed -o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- The confession had taken place on the very evening of the afternoon in which I had failed to unburden myself of my cherry. Heavy-handed Catholicism had captured and nailed down my sinning frame with Inquisitional power; within an hour, I had rushed to Jeppoo Church, a Portuguese-style structure coated with dark green moss and peeling yellow paint. Choosing the oldest and, I hoped, the deafest priest in this saint-rich church, I had confessed, shyly and mumblingly, my inept sin. It was 1969, the year Neil Arm...