Harvey Havel: Stories

The prolific Havel (Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt, 2016, etc.) changes key in his latest novel about friendship, love, and drug addiction. A relationship between a black professor and a white student goes haywire at a college.

Published in 2014. Charlie meets a wealthy and successful mobster at a local bar late one night, and with his help, Charlie hopes to get the woman he is in love with by associating with him. He finds out, though, that even with the mobster's help, he is arrested, loses his job, and is generally tortured by his lot in life and the threadbare existence that comes with it. His only real choice, he decides, is to take action and kill the man who is most responsible for it all: the mobster himself.

A psychological examination of an Incel and the reasons and causes of his Inceldom in a fictional short story. Some scenes and situations may be disturbing to some readers. Reader discretion is advised.

Published in 2006. Set in the suburbs of New Jersey and also New York City, Freedom of Association traces the demise of three poets and their determination to continue their work despite overwhelming odds. Each of their lives converge when one of the poets is sent into the bowels of the inner city where he is ordered by his publishers to mentor a young, radical Black-American slam poet and transform his poetry into verse that is more acceptable to white audiences.

Published in 2009. Fiction from the Hudson Valley Poetry scene features the Poets themselves as Main Characters in a collection of short-stories that depicts some of New York's most well-known downstate poets and artists whom the author has had the privilege of reading with at many popular coffee houses, libraries, and cultural centers throughout his earlier years as a traveling writer in the Hudson Valley, New York. These stories are accessible to all connoisseurs of great short-stories.

Published in 2000. Shia Muslim legend has it that Ali, the fourth Caliphate of Islam, began a familial line of Imams, or religious leaders, to perpetuate his vision and uphold his glory. Throughout history these Imams have been driven into hiding due to the dangers posed by enemies of the Shia faith. The Twelfth Imam is said to be that final Imam who would return to this earth and restore Shia Islam's unity and glory. Yet we must ask: what of today's Imam?

Published in 1999. Noble McCloud is a twenty-seven year-old, college dropout who lives with his father in a wealthy New Jersey suburb. He listens to music. It's the only thing he does, and while doing so he transports himself to warmer climates with warmer women. Although the town is wealthy, he lives with his father in a relatively poor section. He is jobless and broke, until one afternoon, while daydreaming about heading West, he decides to pick up the guitar and make it as a professional.

Published 2009. "Havel's stories probe the psyche's remote corners and investigate the heart's neglected crevasses. His characters are ragged and hopeful; his vision feverish and yet lucidly drawn. Havel skewers authority, defies expectation, and creates an oasis where the spirit stumbles - or soars!"

In "Two Tickets to Memphis", Simon Sample's father is up for reelection in the 14th district of New York City. But when his own father implicates him in a bribery scandal, Simon is forced out of his job and becomes the object of scorn and scrutiny by a relentless New York City press. Simon finds work as an assistant to an elderly man who slowly indoctrinates him into an underground terrorist organization that plans to hold the tenants of a Midtown apartment building hostage.