Böcker av Richard Seltzer

Honorable Mention! Novels Category in the 2023 Connecticut Press Club Communications Contest.¿¿Elle and Oz, strangers ready to restart their lives, meet by chance and flirtatiously swap stories in a dark abandoned house. They soon sense that these stories are coming from an unknown source. It's as if they are watching the stories rather than telling them. Then they become actors inside the stories, seeing and hearing as if they were the characters, affecting outcomes but still conscious of their separate contemporary selves in the dark abandoned house, their attraction heightened by this mysterious adventure. The stories transform: the two become characters from the Odyssey and Genesis, facing challenges in previous lives, challenges that they meet head-on . Finally, and they find themselves in a future where whole populations have transferred themselves to (or been absorbed into) a massive computer network. The human cycle of birth, death, and rebirth will end. They will live in that network forever. But Elle and Oz have a choice.

Because of Covid, Debbie Dawkins has been unable to stage high school plays. This summer she wants to do Shakespeare on the Beach, starting with Romeo and Juliet. No one answers the casting call, until a stranger, Liam, shows up and recites the entire play.He has no idea how he did that. She, by chance, quotes a line from Hamlet, and he starts reciting that play as well. Alarmed. she drives him to the emergency room of a local hospital. There's nothing medically wrong; but she feels responsible for having triggered this Shakespeare mania in him, and she is also beginning to realize that his uncanny ability might open opportunities.Her mother, a psychotherapist, charmed by Liam, thinks he has a rare gift, not a psychosis. There is no barrier to staging public performances, she reassures Deb.He does Julius Caesar, and the audience is entranced. Then he does Macbeth. He needs no rehearsal. A line from the play is enough to send him into his trance. Even fireworks set off by troublemakers do not distract him.They decide to do a different play every day for the rest of the summer. No one understands how he does it. Everyone enjoys it.Reporters learn that all it takes is one line to trigger Liam into reciting an entire play. At the next performance, people in the audience shout lines from many different plays and Liam recites now this one, now that one. The show becomes a farce.Next time, Liam wears noise-reducing headphones to foil hecklers. People in the audience stream his performance from their cellphones to the Web, making it a global event. Its huge success dooms the project. The town shuts them down when a hundred thousand people swarm to Eastport, disrupting traffic and causing random damage.A hundred thousand people swarm to Eastport, disrupting traffic and causing random damage, The town shuts them down. Their fifteen minutes of fame are over.Professor Jaspers, a Shakespeare expert at Yale, becomes interested in Liam and tests him with a few lines from Cardenio, a lost Shakespeare play. Liam recites the whole thing. The professor is astounded. He believes that what he just heard is the play itself. He has Liam do it again and captures it on video and has it transcribed. He wants to make it public but knows that its bizarre provenance would undermine its credibility. He decides to present it as a scholarly work of reconstruction.But a reporter tricks Liam into reciting Cardenio, uncovering the ruse. Instead of a lost masterpiece or a brilliant reconstruction, it appears to be an elaborate hoax.To save face, Jaspers has Liam perform Cardenio at the Yale Bowl, streamed globally and put into the public domain. He provides no explanation. The focus is on the work's literary merit, not how it came to be.In the media storm that follows, Liam-as-Shakespeare becomes a second Elvis, with numerous reported sightings and wild rumors explaining his capabilities and his sudden disappearance.Liam, who felt dehumanized by this mechanical process that took over his mind, comes up with a gadget that allows him to live a normal life. Years later, he starts reciting what sounds like another Shakespeare play, this one about Saint George. Caught by surprise, Deb doesn't record it, and Liam refuses to do it again.Later still, Liam realizes that he no longer needs a special device to think and act normally. But now he regrets the loss. Saint George is somewhere in his mind. He would like to release it to the world. To recover his ability and to remember this play he needs a moment of heightened awareness and anxiety. They schedule a public performance at the Yale Bowl on Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, which is also Saint George's Day.

THIRD PLACE: CT Press Club Professional Communications Contest for General Non-FictionI don't think outside the box. There is no box. The box is an illusion that limits the range of what we consider, squashing curiosity and creativity, ruling out possible solutions.Many of these short essays derive from my belief that, as individuals and as a species, self-regulating mechanisms push us toward balance and reason and compassion. Our worst experiences and dreams can help nudge us in the "right" direction as if some force were trying to navigate a huge ship down a river, with the crudest of controls.I need to know who I am and why I am and how my life might matter in the context of those who came before me and those who will come after. But the answers offered by religion feel insufficient, and scientific knowledge has advanced to the point that it is beyond the understanding of laymen. I would like to participate in the endeavor of scientific discovery and make a contribution, but the advancement of science will not end in my lifetime and will probably never end. I need answers that make sense here and now.I do not adhere to any organized religion or established set of beliefs. But I am not an agnostic. Rather I am a seeker.Life has meaning and that meaning can be found, perhaps in interconnectedness and relationships, and perhaps by intuition rather than reason, and perhaps in flashes of insight.These essays cover: Big Questions; Identity, Memory, and Communication; Understanding the World We Live In; Politics and Government; Literature, Reading, and Writing; The Double-Edged Impact of Technology; History; Business and Product Ideas; and Everyday Life - How to Live, How to Cope.

Five strangers, two men and three women, share a Back Bay Boston apartment like a multi-generational family. High-tech high jinks, vengeful jealousy, and violent death combine to complicate lives and loves.

HONORABLE MENTION: CT Press Club Professional Communications Contest for Humor3000 original jokes grouped as:Trump and CompanyNonsensical Science, Philosophy, History, and ReligionLetter, Number, and Grammar PlaySpeaking in Tongues - Word Play in Two LanguagesNever Grow Up - General FunBedtime Whimsy and RomancePithy jokes for every taste and mood and occasion.

This is both a history book and a book on public opinion. George Gallup, who pioneered survey sampling methods and whose name in fact became synonymous with public opinion polls, conducted his first survey in 1936. The main part of this book starts there as well. Dedicating a chapter to each decade from the 1930s to the present, Seltzer discusses historical events of the period and what the U.S. public thought of those events according to Gallup polls and other public opinion surveys. Each chapter is divided into the following categories: world events; U.S. politics; race; sex and gender; the economy; science, technology and the environment; and popular trends. Within each chapter, approximately 40 survey questions were chosen for more extended analysis: breaking down the results by race, age, gender, education, region, and political party.

Gratuity is based on interviews with 425 people in more than 50 occupational categories. The respondents from across the U.S. reflect the diversity of the population but have one thing in common: they earn tips. A tip is a price set almost entirely by a customer, less connected to demand than to social code. In the U.S., tipping remains one of our most controversial, confusing, and highly variable norms. In their own words, respondents present their perspectives regarding their compensation as well as what they like and dislike about work. Understanding what people think about tipping and how tipped employees experience their work provides an understanding of tipping norms that has never been addressed. The evidence in this study indicates that tips do not appear to increase in accordance with inequality, and tips do not alleviate the discomfort of inequality from the perspective of the tipped employee when they are given to demonstrate status over another. Tips may in some cases serve a redistributive function, but they are not consistent with regard to social status. The evidence in this study also indicates that tips are a weak signal of quality and are not likely to serve as an effective monitoring mechanism. People appear to conform to tipping norms for social and emotional rather than strictly rational reasons. Furthermore, conformity to tipping norms is likewise inconsistent across work contexts. One of the principal mechanisms for fostering conformity lies within the organizational hierarchy, and management plays a critical role. The definitive difference between those who like their job and those who do not is the experience with people, particularly management. Every person who interacts with the public encounters people who are rude or disrespectful. The critical lesson for management is that the emotional costs of these interactions can be mitigated by managers who extend trust and support to employees. The absence of trust in the workplace contributes to a work environment that imposes additional, unnecessary costs on employees and likely affects the experiences of customers.