J Hayes Hurley: 13 books

Little Albert Gachot had only one modest ambition in life. That was to own his own men’s accessories store. Finally settling in Marseille, France, his only chance to fulfill his dream is to borrow money from “The Little Duck,” the local underworld chief. The two men become improbable friends...

An existentialist philosopher, Jack Ireland, is invited to Genoa, Italy, to search for a packet of missing letters supposedly left in a grand palazzo by Nietzsche in the 19th Century. He ends up living in the palazzo as tutor to a cognitive challenged aristocratic boy. What could be the value of philosophy...

Motion and Rest, now in its second edition, is a Gnostic Western. Robert Glin, a paperback writer of western genre pulp, yearns to write an authentic novel about the new American west. One day he meets an old drifter, Thomas Sligo, who claims to be a Messenger god fallen to earth and who, in fact,...

Second Trilogy contains three short novels including: "The Fence", a tightly-woven existentialist fable; "Oblivion", a caustic look at the fate of certain houses, families, and literary efforts; and "Just Cursing", the revised second edition of an earlier Hurley novel.

First Trilogy contains three short novels including “The Poet at Home”, “My Soul is Among Lions”, and “Professor Chamberlin”. The narrators of all three books are old men who reflect back on the wise and unwise lives they have led and the loves they have had and lost.

Seven members of a film crew show up one at a time at Billy’s Bar, the famous watering hole at the American Club of Hong Kong. There they talk to the bartender, Ho, who has the power to elicit their deepest secrets and desires. Questions like what is art cinema, how does it work, and who is in charge...

Joe, a recent graduate from photography school, moves to Amsterdam to seek fame and fortune. Along the way he meets two beautiful Dutch girls, Hennie, a poet, and Danique, a painter. The trio collaborate on sophisticated installations that send Joe on his way to greatness. Joe ends his collaboration...

A young novelist and a newly minted philosopher take off on a road trip across America in a refurbished VW van. Along the way they meet a host of characters, discuss theories of perception and consciousness, read the novelist’s first novel, a Baudelairean feast, and recount the struggles of the philosopher when a student in a mythical graduate school.

Quinton Wrigley, a professional bridge player, lives in Manhattan with his mother, Gertie. On Sunday nights they dress up in 18th Century costumes and delve into such archane subjects as The Mysteries of Egypt. But all that is about to change as Gertie is out looking for a young lover.

A mysterious donor has given a gift to a New York publishing house to pursue the question “Is there progress in philosophy?” A senior editor, Dan Snyder, forms a separate imprint called the Three Rs’ Press, named after the three philosophers Charles Ralston, Michael Radigan, and Eugene Robinson,...

In Third Trilogy: “Corvus at Rest” follows the historical musings of a one hundred year old Roman dictator. “Thou Saw the Fields” chronicles the fate of three young Harvard grads leading ex-pat lives in Barcelona. And “The Chinese Gentleman Dream” uncovers a delightful Heideggarian solution for a billionaire’s social anhedonia.

Nikki and Caroline are two beautiful city nymphs working in present day Berlin, though their memories sometimes carry back to ancient Greece. Through them four Berlin stories interlock. The first is called The Red Princess and concerns the sometimes silly, sometimes fateful doings of members of the...

A successful abstract painter now living in an artists’ colony in upstate New York sits down with a short-story writer over a period of three days to discuss his life’s work. During the talks, there emerges a joyful, jazzlike riff recalling the painter’s fifty-year friendship with another abstract...