El León Literary Arts: Reckonings, by Thomas Farber

Critical Praise

Framed by two insights—no one chooses to be born and no one can help being what they are—and punctuated by visual images of apocalypse and final judgment, Thomas Farber reckons with the calamitous figure of Donald Trump, democracy in crisis, aging and mortality (his own and Trump’s), his career, the role of the writer, and the fate of books. Reflecting on endings with his distinctive curiosity and honesty, Farber has produced an incisive, witty, satiric, and also compassionate book. Reckonings is the latest in a series of remarkable creative memoirs he's written over the past decade, coming to terms with life and its limits.
Samuel Otter, author of Melville’s Anatomies

Sharp, keen-sighted meditations on fate, mortality, and the hellscape of the Trump presidency. Sumptuous and nightmarish, leavened with humor. Richly illustrated with the fantastical art of Hieronymus Bosch and other artists, creating a literary kaleidoscope fitting for our disturbed and disturbing era.
Lillian Howan, author of The Charm Buyers

Funny, perceptive, swinging, bone clean. To fillet #47’s America and still come up with compassion for the condition of the human condition is a brave undertaking; not for the faint of heart.
Ben Sidran, author of There Was A Fire

Canonical images of the imagined terrors of the afterlife find perfect accompaniment in Thomas Farber’s witty and searing reflections on sin, mortality, and the corporeal truth of even the most omnipresent–seemingly inescapable–among us."
Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Water Ghosts and Green Island

Is hell quotidian? Or is it bizarre? Both, say the wonder-struck and matter-of-fact illustrations in Tom Farber’s Reckonings—a note that Farber’s quick, lucid prose keeps up, in a book for our times.
Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet

Opinionator-in-Chief, Demonizer-in-Chief: Reckonings provides pejorative titles for DJT, then notes an exhaustive list is hard to come by, which is fine with the writer. Contempt's not the only fish he’s after. What interests him is awareness of his own mortality juxtaposed against DJT’s apparent lack of it. “Having fought so long for attention and dominance, can he [DJT] grasp the dazzling equality—democracy!— of all humans in death?” In pithy paragraphs, the author suggests how DJT may approach that apotheosis. Though ‘just weighing the options,’ the writer’s reckoning of his own mortality overshadows any future the Self-Deifier-in-Chief can imagine for himself. A wise and shrewd weighing, an illuminating read.
Ben Schwartz, author of The Way It Went and Everything There Was To Tell