[Novel Explosives] is a fascinating book, it's a difficult book, and it's a pleasure to be able to introduce it to you. I think that this is what my program Bookworm is for: to find books like this that are of enormous ambition and largely unknown to readers, and say, 'Hey, get out there! Order the book! Try this out! You haven't seen anything like this before!'" - Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, 89.9 FM, KCRW, July 20, 2017
"We contrasted your humor with Thomas Pynchon's, who's a little more slapstick. Yours is more dry. There's more of an edge to it. But there's also an absurdity to it, which I find very winning. . . . One of the passages that really lit up with me [was when] you contrast a guy who's rotting away in Mussolini's prison with the act of eating a delicious gordita, which I thought was absolutely hilarious." - Jeremy Kitchen, Michael Sack, and Jamie Trecker, Eye 94, Lumpen Radio, WLPN-LP, 105.5 FM, Chicago, April 15, 2018
". . . big, brainy, trippy, Technicolor noir . . ." - Starred Kirkus Review, August 15, 2016
"An amazing novel, a literary masterpiece that reads like a thriller . . . the most fun reading I've had in ages." - Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History, January 2016
It's the week after Easter, April 13th, 2009.
Late in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact, but with no sense of who he is or how he came to Guanajuato. His only clues are a driver's license and ATM card, both of which are in the name of Alvaro de Campos, one of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.
Earlier in the week, a man sits at his desk in an office tower in Santa Monica, California, attempting to complete his memoirs after twenty-five years in the venture business. Unfortunately, one of his current deals may be a money-laundering scam, and its lead investor has been calling him in the night, not only demanding his money back, but citing the relevant passages from Shakespeare's The Tempest .
And in the middle of the week, just before dawn on April 15, two gunmen arrive at an El Paso motel to retrieve a duffel bag stuffed full of currency, and eliminate the man who brought it to El Paso.
Thus begins the three-stranded narrative of Novel Explosives, a search for identity that travels through the worlds of venture finance, the Juarez drug wars, and enhanced-lethality thermobaric weaponry.
Jim Gaueris a mathematician, widely published poet, and possibly the world's only Marxist Venture Capitalist.