Rich Shapero

Decamp with an innocent toiler and his mysterious female companion to a metaphoric world in the clouds—a strange, vertiginous perch that reveals startling insights about the twisted dynamics of love and power.

Balcony of Fog

Blaze a trail with two wayward kids as they explore a private forest whose supernatural potentials illuminate the triumphs and follies of desperate imagination.

Too Far

Wild animus is a search for the primordial, a test of human foundations and a journey to the breaking point.

Wild Animus

Join a girl on the cusp of womanhood in a primeval jungle, and brave a descent into our dark origins. Feud with teenage tribes in the ancient jungle inside us all.

Beneath Caaqi's Wings

Dreams of Delphine

Indulge the obsession of a dying man whose stubborn quest for an ecstatic send-off tests the liberating potentials of belief. Dare to believe in a rapturous transition between life and death that holds the potential to set us free. “Original ideas, strong prose, timelessness and universality . . . Dissolve offers a unique imagining of what might happen to the human soul after it’s left the body.” —Kirkus Reviews

Dissolve

Escape with a disaffected young sculptor from a desert dystopia to “heaven,” a blue ocean realm ruled by a perverse, tentacled god with a mysterious purpose. Your trust may be outraged, but dive deeper and you’ll uncover clues to the creative sea change in our ideals that could redeem a desolate world.

Arms from the Sea

Join a self-exiled carpenter and the teenage daughter he aims to protect as they struggle to rise above the cynicism of a cold-blooded world. The Slide That Buried Rightful will confound your most deeply-held assumptions about right and wrong. Wake to a new understanding of earthly, and unearthly, justice.

The Slide That Buried Rightful

Take a delirious hyper-metaphorical ride with a love triangle into a fiery cosmos. Shapero’s outer space uncannily mirrors inner space, daring us to ditch our expectations and probe the depths of human desire.

Rin, Tongue and Dorner

This enhanced eBook combines Rich Shapero's fiction with his original song compositions, featuring vocals by Maria Taylor (of Azure Ray), and visual art by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Shapero’s Too Far follows an imaginative pair of characters through a transformative summer spent exploring the woods behind their remote Alaskan homes. The forest—and the gods who inhabit it—becomes their refuge until they are forced to choose between the crushing prospects of the real world, and their ideal one.

The Hope We Seek

How far would you go to find yourself? Wild Animus tracks the reckless quest of Ransom Altman, a young Berkeley graduate who—roused by his literary heroes and love for his girlfriend, Lindy—resolves to live in a new world of “inexhaustible desire.” Ransom’s deepening identification with the wild mountain ram, whose passion and wisdom he seeks, drives the young lovers north—first to Seattle, then to the remote Alaskan wilderness. Alone on the unforgiving ridges of Mt. Wrangell, his imagination increasingly unhinged, Ransom begins to devise and act out a dangerous animal mythos, which he documents in a first-person manuscript, and in songs or “chants” that detail his transformation and pursuit by a pack of strangely familiar wolves. The feverish hunt leads from the wilds to civilization and back again. And when the lovers return to brave the perilous mountain together, the truth behind Ransom’s imagined transformation emerges. What they discover in those frozen heights threatens their love as well as their sanity and their lives. Is Ransom inspired by a transcendent truth, or prey to a misguided fantasy? As his grip on reality weakens, the reader shares Ransom’s fears, his hopes, and his extraordinary discoveries. Wild Animus, Shapero’s debut novel, is a search for the primordial and a journey to the breaking point. It is a story of love and surrender, of monomania—of striving, at all costs, for a bliss beyond fear.

Escape with a spurned romance writer and fantasist into an outrageous tropical burlesque, where a cast of metaphorical fruits dares you to surrender to an allegory with deeper resonances. The reward is an unexpectedly sober discovery about the creative act of finding and keeping love.

Rich Shapero

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