New York at Twilight:

New York at Twilight: Selected Tales of Gotham's Weird & Eerie is a collection of intersecting short stories that take place during the twilight hour amidst the city's many neighborhoods and ethnicities. Part comedy of human foible, part tribute to the city and its citizens, part tour guide to its haunts and history, New York at Twilight celebrates the Big Apple at its weirdest and eeriest throughout the decades from the 1960s to the present. Among its hilarious, allegorical, surreal, character-driven plots: an upstate commuter ends up buried under the floorboards in the house of the archer of death; after choosing X as her Confirmation name in honor of recently deceased Malcolm X, a young Irish Catholic maiden makes a life-changing pilgrimage to the RKO move palace in Flushing; a famous fictional New York character comes alive and writes his author an email from the Hudson River; an incarcerated Puerto Rican hears the moon call him to a new vocation in a prison on Staten Island; a Greek college student from Astoria seeking the sexual revolution of the Seventies discovers in the West Village why there is evil in the world; in the East Village a yoga teacher and translator of Kabir with a bottle of white-out has a Kabir-like experience during the 1977 summer blackout; a woman in the Bronx in 2022 coaxes her husband into a becoming a walrus thanks to the music of the Beatles; a Gotham reporter gets more than she bargains for when she meets a magus of twilight's blue hour in midtown; a light-skinned West Indian black man undergoes a trial by fire in his Chinatown loft in 1991 as Rodney King gets beaten up by the LAPD on TV; while dangling over Newtown Creek in a rental car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a downtown diva phones the Empire State Building with a confession of love; a young couple share a hallucination and a cosmic reckoning while hiking their Financial District neighborhood under the influence of magic mushrooms; and a man hit by a car in Central Park discovers a portal to other worlds. Jim Cohn, Director of the Museum of American Poetics, called the collection, "These 13 taleswith a nod to Salinger's depictions of youth alienation and innocence, but also echoing traditions out of Kerouac, Burroughs, Pound, Whitman, and Poeare each tied together by strangely healing moments of sacred awareness as his parade of erotic, confused, and consciousness-seeking characters search for the luminous promise of their being." Carrie Schneider, author of American Yoga, wrote, "While somehow becoming everything from a patently uninnocent Catholic girl busting out of All in the Family Queens to a variously privileged sex addict ordering in from his luxury Manhattan loft, Kirpal Gordon maps a Vedic history of New York that forever changes the topography---not to mention your view of the Empire State Building. Serving language too beautiful for words, Gordon reminds us why we read and write. If you're wondering where the beat has gone, it's here, now, in this groundbreaking collection." John Kruth, author of Rhapsody in Black: A Biography of Roy Orbison, wrote, "The greatest compliment a reader can give an author is the wish that the story would never end which is what I continuously experienced while reading New York at Twilight. Each tale could have morphed into a novel or a major feature film. Gordon skillfully crafts scrumptious muffalettas of luminosity and economy that one can't help but crave more. His literary riffs, mesmerizing metaphors and uncanny plot twists remind me of the solos of heavyweight jazzmen like Coltrane or Rollins, blowing well-ruminated ideas that seem to flow spontaneously in the moment of creation from the primeval fun house of his mind."

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