Bücher von Bob Gilbert

Bob Gilbert's fourth novel, "A Firm State of Heart," takes place in Washington, D.C. Its protagonist, Minneapolis writer Samuel Meckler, is crafting a long poem that's trying to rise above the chaos of the Trump presidency. Meckler supports himself by working as a waiter at Tadich Grill, an upscale Washington restaurant located on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the US Capitol. His interaction with congressmen, senators, foreign diplomats, tourists and media personalities gives him an eyewitness understanding of American politics. His social life takes him into DC cultural salons, ghetto trap houses, and Capitol Hill watering holes. His affair with a famous broadcaster coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic recession, and the death of George Floyd in his hometown. Ultimately, "A Firm State of Heart" is about an idealist trying to formulate a new American narrative in a digital age rife with cynicism and rage.

Green Goes Forth, the prequel to Robert Gilbert's first novel Mintwood Place, is a coming-of-age story set in the 1970s. It features the young Joe Green, who we already know as a divorced father of three, involved in the political skullduggery of Washington, DC. Now we meet young Joe, a senior at American University, who gets himself in trouble and flees the city two steps ahead of the law. His escape takes him to Sonoma County, California, where he goes into hiding. During his lonesome months of exile, he expands his imagination with the study of such books as Homer's The Odyssey, and the I Ching of Confucius. He also becomes a successful marijuana grower. After two years, he returns to DC with money and a gnostic sense that stands in opposition to the emerging politics of the Reagan era. Green Goes Forth is Robert Gilbert's third novel.

Mintwood Place is a delightfully fresh version of the noir tradition, offering the reader a contemporary "Casablanca" in Washington, DC. The book's narrator, Renaissance man Joe Green, has plenty to say about love, politics and the male psyche in this page-turning romantic suspense. Joe runs a bookstore and a bistro and painfully navigates a modern divorce while the Senate Intelligence Committee investigates his relationship with Cosmo, a protégé who has recently been paroled after serving five years in prison for the ambiguous killing of a local black youth. Green, a proud Jersey boy, can all at once relax by watching his tortoises, hand out liberal advice to his three teenagers, and pack serious heat. He is a twenty-first-century American male, if ever there was one.

The Shady Elders of Zion is a Minnesota ghost story. Ivan Kalinsky, the book's narrator, is the last surviving Bolshevik from the class of 1917. When Stalin started purging Jews from the Communist Party ranks in the 1930's, Kalinsky escaped to northern Minnesota, where he lived out a long life as a union organizer. Now dead, he's just about to happily ascend to heaven and reunite with his Bolshevik clan, when two pesky Hassidic ghosts, Singer and Himmelman, blackmail him into helping heal and redirect Joshua Bronstein. Bronstein is a damaged soul, and a candidate for the Lamed Vav, one of the thirty-six hidden righteous men from whom the Messiah will be chosen when God decides it's time. And it becomes Kalinsky's charge to lead stubborn Bronstein out of his wilderness.