Richard Crasta, Author

From the Preface to Works in Progress [available, now in March 2017, only as a download from my website. [This is the slightly changed preface, and it encapsulates the essence of the book and its raison d'etre.] If a man shouts a sentence in the middle of the forest where no one, man or woman, can hear him, is he still wrong? No one can say, not having heard the content of his sentence; and the same thing is true, at this moment, of Works in Progress ( and a few of my other books at my website and elsewhere, which, unlike when I had well-known publishers publishing and publicizing my work, are lost in the Amazon jungle of millions of titles): They may be shouts in the middle of a forest, but since no one* has read it yet, no one can say whether or why it is right or wrong—or whether “right” and “wrong” have any meaning in the context of such an act of pure self-expression. And yet, I needed to shout this book to the world. Or at least to myself. (And maybe that's why t...

It was at a New Year's Party in Mangalore, possibly in 1999, or at the turn of the Millennium, that a relative who had read my book (and there are very few of those--my relatives are mostly non-readers) approached me and asked me, "Where did you find the courage?" He had just read a recent book of mine. Later, I would be told by another reader and passionate fan who searched me out and found me, "I never knew books such as this could be published!" Well, my friends and well-wishers, it's getting harder, because of certain choices I made, to be an independent publisher, have exhausted me financially, and because it's not enough to publish a book, as an independent; you have to market it, and the algorithm gods have to favor you, or your book's existence will not even be known. A few of my books were pure joy to write (though hard work to edit--I sometimes edit a book as many as 30 times). For example: Jesus and Pals Explain Their Daddy Issues a...

Here's my new blog on Tumblr: http://laffsinthedark.tumblr.com/ . I am just discovering Tumblr, and as I was wandering through it, I was led to a Publishers Weekly interview with author Claire Messud, in which she says: "We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t 'is this a potential friend for me?' but 'is this character alive?' . . . .[Nora's] rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost. It doesn’t matter, in a way, whether all those emotions were the result of real interactions or of fantasy, she experienced them fully. And in losing them, has lost happiness." Also, I was led to this statement by Jonathan Franzen in a New Yorker discussion on the same subject: "I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good n...