In This Darkness Has Got to Give, Donn Harris takes us on a gripping journey through the tangled webs of society, politics, anti-establishment culture and the very essence of what it means to seek truth in our times. He masterfully navigates the blurred lines between fiction and non-fiction, reality and dreamscape, asking readers to reflect on the world around them. At times fiery and indignant, at others wise and thoughtful,  Darkness follows a nomadic Grateful Dead acolyte from coast-to-coast and to the high Himalaya in search of the perfect haiku. The memoir is part musical journey, part self-discovery and part a manual for a different way to live. In each section, Harris challenges perceptions, invites debate, and offers a fresh perspective on the events shaping our world. This Darkness Has Got to Give is a non-linear, rousing journey with surprises at each juncture, not unlike a Grateful Dead jam, taking us beyond the surface to experience what lies beneath, and to take responsibility for the world we inhabit. ‘We can claim we are powerless, and that may spare us the tyrant’s wrath today,’ Harris writes, ‘but then we’ll drown in tomorrow’s tsunami. We are led to places we think are inevitable, but we have more choice and agency than we’ve come to believe. We’re lacking courage, which can be overcome, but more importantly we lack clarity - we often don’t know what we’re looking at. It takes a new kind of discipline to see without distortion.’

“To Awaken Again Tomorrow” finds Donn Harris feisty and clever, in 13 essays turning the eye of the intellectual bully on a range of “big” topics: War, Elections, Crisis Response, #BlackLivesMatter, the Census, Racial Statistics and Recalls of Elected Officials — the latter a deeply realized psychologcal profile of a city as it tries to dismantle what it created. As far from the mainstream as you can get without anarchy, Harris tells us: ‘This is not where I usually dwell. Maybe that allows for a fresh viewpoint.’

In Everyone Under the Bus, Donn Harris makes good on the promise of his prior work and excavates the archeology of his career as a school leader by delivering a complex, compelling narrative that highlights the ambiguity of trying to live with purity in a tainted world.

High School Principal Eric Tuico is about to endure a year from hell: stalking his campus like a counter-terrorist agent in search of explsoves and worse, he is under siege from all sides. Decades of resentments clog an already stultifying bureaucracy as Tuico tries to hold onto everything that is dear to him, but there may be just too many fires for him to extinguish, and the forces aligned against him may be just too entrenched and powerful.

Peopled with fascinating and driven characters who zip through the narrative as if they were in an eternal fire drill, we get to see the world we send our kids to every day: random, trivial, stifled by resentment and fear and powered by the occasional flash of brilliance. Harris gives us this world raw and tender, a contrast that at times borders on theater of the absurd: the misassigned cafeteria worker who speaks only Mandarin and Cantonese becomes a key player in a legal drama; a developmentally delayed manchild breaks open who’s behind a terrorist threat; a promiscuous senior filled with hate and rebellion seems to be involved in every scandal-tinged incident; an illiterate boy has grown into a community organizer and appears at a moment of crisis to pay back the man who taught him to read. With over 200 characters, Everyone Under the Bus is at once a panoramic epic and a contemporary book of ideas, and in Eric Tuico — decorated soldier, mixed race globalist, divergent thinker and unfettered risk-taker — Harris has created a complex and embattled man of his times to join Billy Merlin, Ellis Corvalis and Vance Collins in the pantheon of fictional anti-heroes that people the familiar and ravaged landscapes of the writer’s America.

The symbol of America in 2008 was not the flags of 2002 but the fierce and deceptive tumbleweed, gathering in huge numbers at the disturbed sites of foreclosed homes, whole tracts of abandoned residences, boarded up, or guarded by private security, armed, wary, ready to kill for empty space, worthless now but soon to be bring in millions, if only they can get through this crisis, hide the truth and fight off the wrath of the tumbleweeds ……..

‘A mix of Kafka and Joseph Heller,’ a critic described the book. ‘Harrowing, claustrophobic, absurd, we find ourselves sitting through some of the worst meetings we would ever have to attend, with people we would never willingly engage.’ All for the kids.

This Life Does Not Meet Earthquake Safety Standards is a collection of 26 essays that covers ground from the public schools to COVID to the plight of Indian tribes. Longer works like Big Data and Follow the Allegiance defy description, but will take you on a journey across millennia and deep into the soul and consciousness of a thought rebel and stealth observer of our foolish conceits. With a voice at once familiar and jarring, Harris dismantles assumptioms to get at the core of issues we had never considered: Mendacity, a quasi-clinical study of the myriad forms of lying and deception, is destined to be a non-fiction classic in its prismatic wanderings from Disneyland to corporate offices to high school classrooms. At Intermission, we are treated to aphorisms and life lessons that are unlike any advice you have ever received: Politics is what’s left after everything that’s real is stripped away is a painful piece of wisdom that’s hard to deny.

The 50-page memoir Family on Fire and the end piece On the Way to the Future close “EQ” on a personal note that still resonates with the large palette of issues that has been presented to us. The end finds the protagonist in a moment of purity in the back seat of a cab approaching Newark International, returned after a year overseas to a world that doesn’t recognize him, or welcome him to any place in particular. ‘Take me anywhere,’ he told the cabbie. ‘As long as there are airplanes taking off.’

As they approach the airport, the cabbie peers through his front window. ‘Look at all those planes,’ he remarks. ‘No shortage of places to go.’ And the adventure of the next half-century begins.

Billy Merlin lives and breathes Method acting, but at age 27 he knows the world sees him as a mediocre talent at best; and he is starting to have his own doubts. After a particularly bad discovery, his ex-girlfriend tells him: ‘Now you have just what you’ve wanted. You can say that everyone has betrayed you.’ Billy tells her: ‘But it’s true. It’s not a script. I have to write my own lines.’ As Billy moves through the duplicitous world of Los Angeles in the 1980s, he’s juggling a series of incomplete projects, any one of which could come crashing down on his head. Still, he pursues the one elusive triumph: a standing ovation, but he is arrested at a key moment, and a sniper in the audience is taking aim. ‘I just want to look everyone in the eye,’ he ruminates, ‘and be able to say I gave it my best.’ In the end, it all comes down to what the dealer is holding in an all-or-nothing game of blackjack, as he escapes to drier, more stable lands, with the wrong girl on the back of the Harley. 

In “Brother Leper,” Donn Harris weaves a powerful story that melds dramatic and speculative fiction, magical realism, allegory, mysticism and politics into a visionary tale of devastation and rebirth. In the searing summer of 2055, Ellis Corvalis is found in the Mojave Desert, near death, with no memory of who he was or what happened to him. Eventually he is set free with a single piece of identification and a belief that he  can rebuild himself into a full, vibrant man. Thus begins a saga that places innocence at the core of a world trying to rebuild after a devastating natural disaster, and depicts the forces that align automatically against it. Ellis Corvalis is a new kind of leader, but still he is forced to ask, ‘Why is it that the first thing I must do in every new community is set up a jail?’ 

Sexy, original, thought-provoking and filled with symbols and dimensions that challenge the reader at every juncture, in 493 pages Brother Leper pushes a lot of buttons. In Ellis Corvalis, the half Cherokee/half African-American amnesiac, Harris has crafted his most memorable male character, a purist in an impure world, whose internal battles with corruption and violence, merged with his amnesia and innocence, eventually forge a new kind of man: one who contains the entire history of humanity in his vast consciousness, having no choice but to reconcile our worst and best tendencies. In Dolores Ramos, Ellis Corvalis’ object of desire, Harris has given us a deeply rooted, troubled portrait of bruised femininity and ancient longing for a completion of the soul that can never be accomplished. Add to this turbulent love story bizarre social movements that include asexuality and weather worship, and where the philosophy of Quantumism is introduced for the first time, we have a novel of ideas and passions that shows us the future as it has been shaped by the past. Written in 1985 and reworked in 2010, Brother Leper was and is from, about and beyond time, a Jungian echo of deep collective consciousness.

Action researcher Vance Collins, on the eve of his 50th birthday, embarks on a series of clandestine investigative searches: for his past, using restricted government tools to locate his lost brother and a former lover with whom he may have had a child; for information on the foes of his employer, the enigmatic power-broker Tenzing Horowitz; and for the future, in the embattled grounds of the public school system.

In a world poisoned with environmental aggression and beset by social chaos, we encounter the fractured and the delusional: a crime victim in a halfway house, unable to cope beyond the four walls of her room; an unknowable longshot candidate for the Caliornia governorship, running against himself with an election years away; a sexy, troubled circus performer, second-in-command to a wildly rich meth dealer; and a cruel, controlling Bolivian prince, heir to a throne that doesn’t exist.

A coming-of-age-story for a man entering his second half-century, told in elegant prose and expertly managing a range of fully realized subplots, Standing Here Alive is the poignant story of one man’s attempt to bring meaning to a world on the verge of collapse, where it all could come down to the twelve minutes that even rational people can’t agree on. With his family disintegrating, his employment ended, his freedom threatened and his lover locked in a mysterious social media profile, Vance Collins is an Everyman watching the American Middle Class, from his front row seat, in its explosive and scarring deconstruction, its pieces lying at his feet, recognizable but no longer viable.