The Skip Gershwin Tetralogy

Recovering narcissist Skip Gershwin loses his teaching job and his condo on the same day. It’s only through the intervention of his friend, cognitive scientist Gudrun Frege, that he’s saved from plummeting head first into a vortex of total despair. During this trying moment in his life, the one thing that sustains him is his strange fascination with the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, the largest and most spectacular fair ever held in the United States.

Yes, you'll laugh your ass off! Yes, you'll want to listen to this quirky unpredictable novel all in one sitting! And, yes, you'll recommend it to your friends and maybe even your enemies! In The Nothingness Imperative, author Herb Guggenheim captures life at the bleak onset of the Trump era and he does so with biting wit and startling clarity. But The Nothingness Imperative is more than just satire: It's a probing exploration of all that keeps humanity from the brink of despair.

Professor Harold Berwyn has just been brutally murdered, but graduate creative writing student Skip Gershwin is too self-absorbed to care. His chief preoccupations are finding a girlfriend and becoming a famous American poet. When he meets Gudrun Frege, a brilliant Austrian au pair, it appears that his girlfriend problems are over. But he is soon lured into a torrid love affair by ultra-seductive art student Lana Fish. As Skip's romantic entanglements spiral out of control, the criminal investigation into Berwyn's murder turns white-hot.

In 2023, poet Skip Gershwin returns to Soleri College — the experimental school in the desert Southwest where he was once a student — simply expecting to teach. Instead, he steps into a politically engineered takeover. A powerful governor has installed a new board determined to purge Soleri of “wokeness,” placing courses, faculty, and students under ideological siege. As the campus fractures, resistance forms in uneven, conflicted ways: principled, chaotic, and sometimes self-defeating.