Tentative cover designs for more books currently underway, Brannigan’s Quest, the second novel in the Baron & Brannigan series, and The Rover, a prequel to Baron & Brannigan, the first novel. Watch for them. Better yet, subscribe to Ed’s Personal Book Club and receive Bits & Pieces for up-to-date news. See below.
Baron & Brannigan
Book I, Song and Dance
A Novel of the 1890s
It’s the early 1890s. By chance, Billy Brannigan, age 17, meets young Daniel Baronovich, a runaway not yet 15, in front of Della Lacy’s brothel in St. Louis. Brash and handsome, Billy is a seasoned performer with Doc Noble’s medicine show helping to peddle Doc’s cure-all Elixir of the Incas. Daniel’s ability to play piano gets him an invitation to join Billy and Doc.
And so begins this story that follows the two youths on their haphazard journey from the medicine show to the Primrose and West travelling minstrel troupe and then on to old New York’s gas-lit music halls and vaudeville theaters where they perform as Baron and Brannigan, Song and Dance.
It’s a bumpy journey, though, with missteps and mayhem dogging their path. Along the way, the team mixes with talented acts, willing showgirls, zany song writers, and famous personalities of the gaslight era including John L. Sullivan, Victor Herbert and Tony Pastor.
Both young men find love; Billy meets Lily Langford, his own age and already a veteran vaudevillian, and Daniel dreams of Claire, Doc Noble’s daughter. Unfortunately, life, like love, seldom follows the road chosen. Before they can claim stardom, calamity strikes and threatens to end their career and friendship.
Gambler’s Luck
and other short stories
Author Edward Farber is on a winning streak with a roll of eleven stories in this new collection of short stories. But there’s no luck involved here, just excellent story-telling talent. You will discover it in the lead story, “Gambler’s Luck,” an intriguing tale that keeps you guessing until the last bit of dialog.
The stories range from intense drama in “Faith,” an allegory that takes place in a Nazi concentration camp, to laugh-out-loud humor in “The Five-Step Flood.” In between, you’ll meet a diverse group of characters including an elderly American bartender in a British pub, a medicine show owner who dazzles the midwestern townfolks with a wild, buggy ride, a calculating business owner lamenting a lost love, and more stories to make reading this book a positive pleasure.
Here is one of the reviews by Advance Copy Reviewers: Bertrand Carter writes, “Once again, the author has shown his strength as a fiction writer with this collection of short stories that had me hooked with the first one, ‘Gambler’s Luck.’ I couldn’t put it down until I finished the last one. The book is a short but entirely captivating read.”
Ed Farber’s earlier collection of short stories, Echoes of Clara Avenue is currently on sale as a Kindle ebook.
Echoes of Clara Avenue
A Collection of Short Stories
Take a stroll along an old, decaying, city neighborhood
with its now-empty, silent hulks and imagine the people who lived there through the years. That is precisely what author Edward Farber does in his collection of short stories, Echoes of Clara Avenue. In the collection are stories that appeared previously in literary magazines, an indication that these are not stories by a novice but by a practiced storyteller with a vital and varied voice.
Now the houses that remain await the wrecking ball,
but as the old saying goes, oh what stories they could tell. And the author obliges with 13 engrossing tales that begin in 1903 when fictional Clara Avenue was brand new. With each story, you will travel through time to the end of the century. Along the way, you’ll visit selected houses and flats where you’ll encounter a rich array of characters facing life situations both dramatic and humorous in stories as diverse as the houses and times in which they lived.
You’ll wonder who you will meet next as you stroll down
this old block and listen to its echoes.
Print editions coming soon. Join Ed’s Book Club for the latest news.
Looking Back with a Smile
Bits and Pieces of a Lifetime
A Memoir
There’s a chuckle on every page of Looking Back with a Smile as Ed Farber, recollects in brief but entertaining anecdotes bits and pieces of a life that has spanned more than seven decades. These are quick looks at what he calls an “ordinary” life, each served up with a laugh.
A sampling of the subtitle over each anecdote gives a little insight into Ed Farber’s humorous approach: A Wig in the Waste Can; Hiding from Cousin Sophie; A Low Point at High School; Hot Fudge Sundae, Hold the Fudge; Teeth? Who Needs Teeth?; Teenagers, A Whole New Brand of Kids; Lucky Ticks Me Off; What’s a Skink?; ESP on the Way to L.A.; An Instant Grandchild.
These and other bits and pieces take the reader on a merry romp through growing up during the Depression and wartime 1940’s, the transitions from grade school to high school to college to the military and, finally, to marriage, kids and grandkids. On the way we also laugh about pets, secretaries, bugs in the BOQ, being a canine midwife, and many more incidents and observations all dished out with warmth and wit.
Buy NowPrint editions coming soon. Join Ed’s Book Club for the latest news.
And More to Come
