Books by Michael Hoffman

Brave Tsavo, the first Rhodesian Ridgeback hound, never really dies. The African nature god Shango blesses him with multiple lives, and he travels through time and space as a boon to the people he loves. Follow his heroic journey from battles with ferocious lions on the Dark Continent to his 9/11 disaster site search and rescue miracles. Watch him soften the hearts of weary soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg and open the doors of perception for patients in the office of a famous Beverly Hiils psychiatrist.Colorful African mythology and the literary freedom of magical realism have inspired Hounds of Mercy. Dog owners know that communication with their companion animals is no fantasy. When you finish reading "The Psychiatrist's Hound", take your own beloved canine for a walk and just ask, "What do you think happens in the story about Lockdown, the prison hound?"

Travel companions on my journeys are four in number: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Basho." (Travel) "He walked in priestly garb. Arriving towards evening at a town or village, he'd chant sutras until passersby gave him, or flung him, enough money for a flophouse bed, a little food, a bath and enough saké to induce a measure of forgetfulness. 'A beggar,' he admonished himself, 'has to learn to be an all-out beggar. Unless he can be that, he will never taste the happiness of being a beggar.'" (Walking) '"The pleasantest of all diversions,' said the fourteenth-century Japanese priest Kenko," is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.' Reading is inseparable from reverie. 'Sitting alone under the lamp,' I was soon not alone at all, but hosting, I venture to say, as vivid and varied a company as ever gathered under one roof. (Genji, Myshkin and Jones) "Everest is nothing, mere seismology." (Fuji, Sinai, Olympos)

"Listen, Granule, about what daddy said. Is it true?""Mummy said he was joking.""I think it's true.""Really?""I think so.""D'you mean mummy's a liar?"Mandolyn was thoughtful. Granule's eyes were fixed on her face. He loved her face. It was so… he didn't know the word… it kept changing… unlike his own, which was always the same. Mandolyn smiling and Mandolyn grave were almost two different people; Mandolyn laughing was a third; Mandolyn perplexed a fourth, and so on. When she was deep in thought, two tiny wrinkles appeared on her forehead, making her look, to Granule, almost old, though otherwise, partly because she was so small, partly because of what Granule thought of as her beauty, she seemed younger than her nine years and could easily pass for seven or even six."Let's run away," Granule suddenly blurted out.

Green sheds new light on the gamut of issues associated with renewable energy, a topic whose importance increases exponentially with every temperature record-setting year. It covers the misinformation and confusion over global warming, and demonstrates the degree to which renewable energy can be part of the solution.

Michael Hoffman's characters are, willy-nilly, participants in plots that don't add up. Some emerge stronger; others, shadows of their former selves. The six stories and one novel that make up this collection are set, wholly or primarily, in Japan, land of the artful mask. Meet the man who loses his key and sets in motion a chain of events whose incomprehensibility he will never understand; a small girl who accosts a fugitive murderer (is he really a murderer?) for sex, only to be admonished to go back to school; a murdered boy who is resurrected (is he really?) and wreaks his mad revenge; and, finally, Sidney Levin, whose reunion twenty years later with a lost Japanese girlfriend ends in a hopeless entanglement with her growing daughter.