A book, said Franz Kafka, should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us. But New York City tax attorney Harbinger Singh wants the book he plans to write to be used in another way: as a tool of revenge upon the wife who's left him.

When he has trouble starting it, Harbinger turns to professional book doctor Arlette Rosen for help. Arlette's clients all ask the same kinds of questions: Has it been said before? Do their characters have originality or depth or, even better, both? Are they alive? Will the book stay in print for more than a few weeks? Will everyone love them because they wrote it?

Arlette is like an alcoholism counselor who drinks. Though she's great at helping others create and polish books, she's unable to write the novel stirring in her own heart. Finding time is part of the problem; she's besieged by letters pitching projects like The Alzheimer's Joke Book, Faggot Kike (a tale of a gay rabbi), and How to Make Love to a Man, a Woman, or Anything Else! She reads her favorite pleas to her emotionally constrained boyfriend Jake, and carefully files them, but she's meticulous about selecting books to nurse. Arlette's not quite sure why she agrees to work with Harbinger. He doesn't seem very serious about his project, and she suspects he's visiting her the way someone might visit a regular doctor for health.

The two meet weekly to do writing exercises. Between-session assignments turn into a more personal correspondence and then, an increasingly intimate relationship. Free-spirited Harbinger gives Arlette new names—Haldora, Aretha, Yvette—and sings to her in public. Soon she's singing back to him and wondering, why doesn't my boyfriend sing? Why haven't I sung before?

Book Doctor's setting is Woody Allen's New York; characters dress in black, their default emotional setting is anxiety, and they speak and write in wry, declaratory outbursts. Though the story is occasionally streamed through other characters, it is Arlette's determinedly unsentimental yet palpably sensitive viewpoint that prevails. Her feelings emerge most fluidly when she writes; written creation is almost another character here: the players discuss it, engage in it, and ponder it sagaciously, as in this letter to Harbinger, offering advice of value to any writer: "The point is not the book, but the writing. Once you are able to make writing a part of your life, and that isn't easy, your life will be changed. I don't mean in a big way necessarily. You won't get another job or marry a different kind of woman, or walk to work down different streets. But once you let yourself begin to describe whatever you see, the process of seeing itself is altered. You have a way to put the pieces together, or pretend. The kind of writing you do doesn't matter. Neither does its future."

Written expression is king in Arlette's world. The characters seem to be writing even when they speak, which occasionally makes the book's pace seem ponderous. But overall, this is a dryly humorous and tenderly observed tale, rich with insight into writer's block and its related maladies, love and life block.

Author Esther Cohen, a New York City resident with a weekend home in Greene County, once worked as a literary medic; at times her lead character seems to lack a comfortably fictional distance. But Book Doctor, Cohen's second novel, will have special value to those who tinker with words, as will its conclusion: by the story's end, Kafka's axe has triumphed over Harbinger's poison dart. Once again, the act of writing cleaves open everyone fortunate enough to come near it.

On October 30, 2004, Mayor James Sottile of Kingston, New York, hosted a reception in honor of the upcoming publication of Alf Evers's book Kingston: City on the Hudson. Evers, the region's preeminent historian, took up his pen at the age of 86 to begin his 640-page history of the City of Kingston, completing it just before his death in 2004 at the age of 99. On hand to take part in the celebration were Overlook Press's publisher Peter Mayer, distinguished poet/musician Ed Sanders, and crowds of Kingstonians and other lovers of regional history who had long awaited the publication of this important contribution to American history.

To many, Alf Evers's name is synonymous with the Catskills, and for good reason. In 1984, Evers wrote Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock, a seminal work about the importance of the region from the time of its earliest settlement through the original Woodstock Festival and beyond. This book was followed in 1995 by In Catskill Country: Collected Essays on Mountain History, Life and Lore, a collection of essays on a variety of subjects, including Kaaterskill Falls, the Ulster & Delaware Railroad, and steamboats on Halcottsville Pond. In 1997, Evers published Woodstock: History of an American Town, an up-close-and-personal look at that larger-than-life small town in Ulster County.

Somewhere in between these books, the indefatigable Evers managed to find the time to research and write his last, and perhaps his most important work. With his Kingston history, Evers has written a great book about a great city. Although the book is not intended for scholars, the average reader may have trouble with what Ed Sanders, Evers's amanuensis in the last years of Evers's life, and himself a noted writer, describes as Evers's "mature" style. The sentences are long, like a dozen train cars held together with commas and semi-colons; still, they are worth every bit of time it takes for the train to leave the station.

Once the capital of New York State (a fact that still seems to surprise some of its residents) the City of Kingston has a surprisingly rich and deep history. Evers describes its prehistoric ice age era around 12,000 BCE, the struggles of the Esopus Native Americans with the early Dutch settlers, the further struggles of Dutch settlers with their British brethren, the success of the steamboat industry, the creation of the D&H Canal, the coming of the railroads, the rise of baseball and more, through the 20th century and into the 21st.

Evers's sympathy for the Esopus Native Americans and the rough treatment they received at the hands of early Dutch and British settlers, though indirect, is moving. Here, finally, is an American history that tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Evers relates these attitudes and incidents matter-of-factly, without fanfare or sensation, as a part of our cultural heritage.

Kingston: City on the Hudson was fittingly published by Overlook Press, a distinguished literary publisher with roots in both Woodstock and another city on the Hudson, Manhattan. Perhaps the most striking thing about Evers's book, besides his meticulous research and impressive breadth and depth of knowledge, is his prescience about the need for such a book at this time. The present and potential future of Kingston, the renewed Rondout waterfront, a keener awareness of the uptown Old Stockade area, restoration of the City's 17th- and early 18th-century Dutch stone houses all point to a greater appreciation of more than 350 years of written European history, not to mention the oral traditions of generation upon generation of Native Americans before the coming of the white man. All this adds up to a proud—and sometimes ignominious—history that Kingstonians have a right to celebrate, honor, and use as a yardstick for the future.

For his part, Alf Evers has taken his place alongside that other great chronicler of the Catskills, Roland Van Zandt, as one of the region's most talented and revered historians.

Bard professor Bruce Chilton loves giving guided tours of the faraway times and places that birthed modern religious tradition. What he reveals is often surprising and never dogmatic. Like any good investigator, the author of Rabbi Jesus and Rabbi Paul simply lays the evidence before his readers instead of telling them what to think.

Mary Magdalene: A Biography takes on a timely bit of ancient history indeed. Females in positions of influence—from Condoleezza Rice to Martha Stewart, Hillary Clinton to Oprah Winfrey—have never been more evident. The idea that there was a woman in a position of influence in Christianity's newborn period, before the religion was even named, is intriguing.

Who was Mary to Jesus, and he to her? Leaving aside questions that no one presently incarnate can reliably answer, Chilton presents them as spiritual colleagues. There were, he tells us, more than a dozen apostles in any case, and many sources for the oral history that was to become, a generation after the Crucifixion, the New Testament. And as Christianity evolved, a fair amount of editing took place. Mary's role, however, was too crucial to be completely expunged: she was, the stories tell us, the first to be aware of the Resurrection.

When the gal from Magdala met the guy from Nazareth, she had a big problem: a tough case of possession. Later revisionists have presented her as a former prostitute, and medieval historians portrayed her as wealthy and spoiled, but Chilton points out that Magdala was a simple fishing village, not an early metropolis, and that any woman still unwed in her twenties bore a stigma. Women, back in the day, were meant to be handed over from father to husband somewhere around puberty.

It apparently took Jesus about a year to rid Mary of her unclean spirits (a timeframe that a modern therapist might envy), and during this time and after she evidenced a talent for spiritual good works as potent as her problems had been. She was to walk beside Jesus as a student, companion, healer, and anointer. "Mary Magdalene approached the right rabbi when she sought out Jesus," Chilton observes. "He reveled in his reputation for consorting with allegedly loose women (the word loose being applicable to any woman who did not bear her husband's or father's name, or some other token of male protection.)"

In Capernaum, where people gathered to hear an extraordinary rabbi speak about how a God of love and mercy could change the world, Mary was a part of the inner circle. Though there is no definitive evidence to prove or disprove the speculation that they were lovers, it is reliably reported that they did seem to kiss quite a bit.

Uncovering women's roles in ancient times is tough detective work, not least because of political revisionism. "By getting the converted Magdalene away from her mirror, out of bed, and into postures of penitential prayer, proponents of a Christian piety during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance provided a powerful model for appropriate feminine behavior," Chilton observes. The association of her name with repentance and self-abnegation was more useful than recognition of her as a practitioner of exorcism, healing, and anointment in her own right. The Gnostics kept more of Mary's contribution intact, connecting her tradition to that of Sophia, goddess of wisdom. (The Gnostics were forever being accused of encouraging orgies or worse, demonstrating that scare talk about the competition is hardly a new tactic in pulpit or politics.)

How Christianity and the world got from there to here is a fascinating mystery, and it's great fun to follow Chilton as he ventures out to shine a beam of neutral scholarship into the corners.

Thaddeus Rutkowski's experimental second novel, Tetched: A Novel in Fractals, provoked a telling remark from a writer friend suffering from creative blockage. After reading a few of the novel's "fractals"—chapters composed of several paragraph-sized vignettes—he said in a puzzled, awed tone, "This is just like my journal—but it works as a book." True, Tetched reads like journal entries written in the thick of things (not, as in most journal-style books, which are written obviously after the fact, with the luxury of having processed and judged the reported events). But don't let Tetched's fits-and-starts fragments fool you. Rutkowski's novel has the depth and complexity required to engage the reader utterly in a seamless, forward-moving narrative.

Fractals are, after all, repeating geometric forms hat have complex and often changing shapes, such as clouds. Or dysfunctional families. Rutkowski successfully navigates his narrator's strange childhood by using 38 literary fractals, each of which is evocatively titled ("Woman with Breast," "Peculiar Needs") and could stand alone as flash fiction or one-act play. His paragraphs are written like film script scenes, with implied fade-in and fade-out, which are in turn composed of sentences that are tiny, no-frills portraits ("Her former boyfriend stared at the marks and said, 'My God!'").

The novel's quirky title is key to both its structure and subjects. This spare, edgy bildungsroman opens with a dictionary definition of the adjective  it takes as its title: "somewhat unbalanced mentally; touched." With an alcoholic, ex-military, failed-artist, stay-at-home father prone to anger and occasional demands for pushups so that his oldest son won't turn into a "sissy," and a Confucian Chinese breadwinner-mother given to sudden, inexplicable commands like tasting one's own urine ("This is Eastern urology!"), the narrator—who is not even named until the 33rd chapter—has a lot of trouble fitting into the world. His gym teacher calls him Mouse; his father advises him to marry an Asian woman or "wring your hands and become a fairy;" his little sister says she always thought she'd grow up to marry a man who looked like him, until she realized no man does. If the narrator is "touched," it's because nobody—save for the boy he plays "primary care physician" with or the neighbor kid who uses a failed shop class project to administer shock treatment—touches him at all as a child.

Nonetheless, as we all eventually do, the narrator finds himself grown up: in college, hitching across the country, then living in the city and trying to be a writer. He seeks physical and emotional connection through the most desperate, forceful means: sadomasochism. In darkly comic prose reminiscent of Lorrie Moore and reporting so full of factual detail it's almost literary by default ("I was sure that this person and I could build something together. We could interface in a torturous environment"), Rutkowski's narrator tries to "get ropey" with several women and discovers how "tetched" he really is. Alone more than "hitched," he realizes absence is as devastating a loss as forfeiture.

Yet there are moments of hilarity and beauty throughout the book, bright glimmers of the underside of bleak despair. At an artists' colony, a composer who "liked to vacuum objects with his mouth," advises the narrator, "Learn to be a bubble blower or a rubber hose." Finally, after years alone, a woman who can match wits with him locks her arms around his neck and says, "Now you're stuck with me." When he tells her, "Please don't give me any static," she answers, "Cling...I'll give you static cling." In the end, their child lights up so much from her father's joking that she grins and covers her eyes every time he asks her, "What's happening?"

Rutkowski, who shares his narrator's biracial heritage, has taught at the Hudson Valley Writers Center and has been published in local literary journals. His first novel, Roughhouse was a finalist for an Asian American Literary Award. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter. The message of Tetched, he recently told interviewer Mickey Z., "is obvious, though it isn't simple. I'm saying, among other things, that behavior patterns don't go away quickly, so you "best think hard before you go setting patterns."