The Count Is the Mercy
Disguised Suicide and the Coroner's Verdict. In the fall of 1983, a Nebraska state trooper told a college sophomore a thing he did not say aloud: when you read about a one-car crash that kills the driver on a lonely highway in the middle of the night, you are usually reading about a suicide. Forty-three years later, that sophomore, the author of this book, takes the whisper apart at the seams. The inquest runs in four movements: the courthouse where the county prosecutor is also the county coroner, the journals that asked the question while he walked the ditches, the countries that changed their count by sending someone to ask, and the ledger that prices what a kind verdict costs the count. The dead stay at pattern level. The seams stay visible. The record wins.
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Known to Me Personally
Twelve Stories of Moral Character Revelation. Twelve people asked for the truth at the moment it costs the most: a scale man in Nebraska with two percent hidden inside the dial head, a cook on a shrimp boat deciding which of two true stories the record will carry, a crane operator reading a load chart into the record whole, a man exonerated who will not sell his eighteen years, a producer who took a dead man's voice, a woman who stops running in the seconds it takes a boy to go through the ice. Each story lends a person to the next. And at the end of the book, at a card table in Grant, the notary who has asked ten thousand signers whether they want what they are signing finally answers for the dead. The counties are real. The paper is invented. The witnesses are known personally.
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Raise Your Right Hand
The Oath on Trial. Raise your right hand: the courtroom speaks the oldest stage direction in the law, and the formula it speaks is only half a sentence, the punishment clause amputated over three thousand years of use. This book stops the clock on that half sentence and follows the missing half: the Hittite wax and the Roman flint, the ring reddened on the Icelandic altar, the count of twelve sworn mouths, the blind oath John Lilburne refused at the price of the whip, the statute of 1563 that invented perjury, the Quakers who would not swear, the member for Northampton who would not leave, and the affirmation they forced into law. The missing half is not missing. It is printed in small type above every signature line, and the laboratory has measured what the spell still does. The hand comes down. The record stands.
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PREPLAY
Rehearsing the Lives You Never Led. You dream in places that never existed, and inside the dream you never doubt them: the staircase that was never there, climbed anyway, a hundred steps without a handrail. In 2003 a counting study found that two-thirds of remembered dreams draw on the days around them, while a whole day handed back intact appears in no more than one or two dreams in a hundred. The rest is construction, and this book follows it to the engine: the channels tested and closed at Maimonides and sealed by the physics of the weld, the crossings that measurably exist, from two-way traffic inside verified dreams to the whisper at the edge of sleep, the shelf of futures the brain stocks before experience arrives, and the boundary that gives the ache its measured name. Five of the author's own dreams are banked verbatim across a lifetime and read twice each, once told cold and once equipped. Wonder with receipts.
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The Us of Us
A Decade in the Life of the First Person Plural. On the morning of June 8, 2016, a 723-word essay indicted the American plural, and that same evening a domain name gave the argument a home: nine hours and nine minutes between the argument and the address. Ten years later this book recounts the decade of we, measured and never merely mourned: the inaugural series counted from 1789 forward, the balcony in Milan, the chant quoted whole, the resumption at 3:44 in the morning, the shareholder letters and the terms of service, the machine that learned to say we at three in the morning, and the remnant that passes every test the decade could apply. The count was registered in advance and prints in full, and the author's own archive sits inside the specimen jar. The plural did not die. It moved. The map of where it went is the book.
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The Censor Keeps a Copy
A History of the Pleasure of Taking Things Away. Twenty years ago a man walked into a bookstore, mentioned the stake president, and watched a shelf go bare, then bought two paperbacks to make up the difference. That afternoon is followed through four centuries of the record: Comstock's Chamber of Horrors, the locked shelves of the Enfer, the blue pencil at two guineas a play, the boys of Florence, the Filthy Fifteen, the school-board form with its blank line. The finding is structural: to rule on a book you must read the book, so every regime of taking builds a library of what it forbids. The censor keeps a copy. The pleasure of taking is the product, and the removal is the receipt.
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The Stopwatch Moralist
Rod Serling and the Drama Built to Outlive Its Airdate. The live theatre of the 1950s burned its sets every night: no rerun, no archive, no memory. Serling was sanded twice by that economy, twice when he tried to tell the Emmett Till story straight, and he answered with engineering: the impossible premise stipulated inside the opening minutes, the ending computed from character, and the author's face in the frame as a signature no sponsor could strip. The book carries its own instrument: all ninety-two endings Serling wrote for The Twilight Zone, ruled one at a time with the airdates attached, sixty-three computed and twenty-nine drawn from the drum, the dream, and the rug. Sixty-seven years later, the machine still plays tonight. The god arrives early. The endings are earned. The door still opens.
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First the Sky Turns Green
Reading the World Before It Strikes. A green sky over the Nebraska sandhills means water is coming, and the family that knows the sign is already moving. That knowing is the oldest human technology: a prediction made from partial signal under time pressure, trained by consequence, corrected by verdict. Sixteen chapters walk the first literacy from the alley and the porch through the surf line, the fireground, the ward, and the cockpit, then count what every readout silently retires. It ends at a kitchen window, where the sky is handed down, and the lesson is one sentence long: look up, and say what you see out loud.
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The Watermark
A Fractional Fiction Novel, the twelfth in the series. The city computes its poor as calories, and the water keeps its own account. Anselm Wenger, the Relief Bureau's best computer and the Quarter's singing clerk, writes the Trust's scheme as an indictment, in the Trust's own grammar, with the Trust's own adverbs, and the city reads it as a plan. The account year runs from the winter's closing of the books to the water's spring accounting: the scheme adopted, the songs counterfeited with one word moved, the reservoir climbing by chalk marks over the pump hall where the Trust will hold its ceremony. The flood answers first.
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The One-Way Drop
Zero Tolerance and the Rules We Write for Other People. A single drop of ink ruins the glass; a single drop of wine, falling into sixty parts of water, vanishes; both rules are law somewhere. Sixteen chapters follow contamination arithmetic from a Philadelphia laboratory through the Virginia statutes, the census pencil, the Nuremberg drafting rooms, and the caste distance tables, to the machines now grading prose. It ends in the one kitchen where a drop is forgiven, and with two laws that tell you who wrote every rule you live under.
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No One Dies Lying
Last Words on Trial. In May of 1929, in officers' quarters at Fort Riley, Kansas, Zenana Shepard told her nurse, “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me,” and her sentence went to trial without her. The law calls it a dying declaration and has trusted the dying for centuries. Fourteen chapters put that trust in the dock, from the Tudor scaffold to Desdemona's dying lie to the bodycam, and the last chapter hands down its verdict.
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Swimming the Author
Who Is Allowed to Have Written This? In the seventeenth century, a woman accused of witchcraft was bound thumb to toe and lowered into a pond. If the water received her, she sank innocent. If it refused her, she floated guilty, and the court had its proof. In 2026, a student accused of machine writing is handed a percentage: software certain to the decimal, wrong at scale, and believed anyway. The verdict lands, then as now, on women, on the young, on the improbable author. The last line is four words long, and the whole book earns it.
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Fractional Fiction
View Series →A Series by David Boles
Classic literature meets contemporary research. Each novel synthesizes a public domain masterwork with modern science.
The Watermark
The city computes its poor as calories, and the water keeps its own account. An indictment written in the Trust's own grammar reads as a plan, and the flood answers first.
The Disposition
A wildlife facility's green ledger rules one word per life across twenty-two years, and eleven of the lines belong to children. One night, one voice, and the words we file people under.
The Wergild
A Black undertaker's parlor keeps a ledger from 1919 to 2026, recording what the county's death registers never asked. What does a family do when the debt owed for a killing will never be billed?
The Likeness
Voice cloning and the machinery of fabrication. What happens when ninety-three seconds of synthetic speech can destroy a career built over fifteen years?
Standard Deviation
Five characters caught in a municipal scoring system. What happens when the human body is inscribed within digital circles and squares?
Civility Certified
A dossier novella. What happens when access becomes a credential? A bureaucratic horror story told through the documents themselves.
The Somnambulist's Prophecy
Prophetic somnambulism and the burden of foreknowledge. What do we owe to visions we never asked for?
The Corollary
Women's witness networks in WWI. One refusal to say amen becomes an act of international resistance.
The Held Land
Black land dispossession and inherited memory in Nebraska. Three families, 159 years, one quarter-section of prairie.
The Dying Grove
Fungal consciousness and networked memory in the Pacific Northwest.
The Inheritance
Epigenetic trauma and family secrets in Nebraska.
The Kinship of Strangers
Genetic identity and unexpected connection.
The EleMenTs Series
View Series →A Trilogy by David Boles
Disabled superheroines of earth. Power that exists because of disability, not despite it.
Beneath the City
Elle commands wind. Meen controls fire. Teena moves earth. In the tunnels beneath New York, three girls discover what they can do.
The Invisible Hand
Tal arrives with power over water. Prometheus Applied Sciences springs its trap. Four elements, four girls, one choice.
The Reckoning
The fight goes to Washington. A Senate hearing. A shadow corporation exposed. The conclusion.
The Westborough Crusaders
View Trilogy →A Trilogy by David Boles
Eight scripts. Two episodes. One trilogy. A 1982 television series becomes three novels about a high school newspaper, a dying boy, and the adults who failed all of them.
The Year Before the Wire
The summer and school year before the cameras arrive. Ares, Crew, Stan, and eight lives converging toward a sophomore year that will change everything.
A Farewell to Shins
The eight episodes. The cameras record what the hallways produce. Tiffany Brass arrives. Stan disappears into the bottle. Bergie carries the paper bag to school.
The Stopped Clock
The year after the wire goes dark. Consequence, recovery, and the question of what remains when the cameras leave.
ASL Linguistics for Practitioners
View Series →A Series by David Boles & Janna Sweenie
The rigorous linguistic and pedagogical framework that advanced signers need. Three volumes covering arm biomechanics, spatial grammar, and non-manual syntax.
Arm Angles in ASL
Where does a sign live in space, and why does placement matter? The biomechanical coordinate system of the arms and hands, formalized for instruction.
Depicting Space
Classifiers as a grammatical system, not a handshape list. How signers construct, reference, and manipulate spatial relationships through classifier morphology.
Beyond the Hands
The face and body govern grammar. Eyebrow position marks questions, gaze assigns reference, body shift drives role play. Non-manual syntax, systematized.
An Institutional Autopsy
View Trilogy →A Trilogy by David Boles
Three long-form institutional histories, each at sufficient length to map an actual American architecture. Coroner-grade examination, primary sources, no policy recommendations.
Carceral Nation
Three centuries of American surveillance moving from the prison yard to every other institution. When the walls came down, the logic walked out through the gap.
The Claimed Body
American institutions divide the human organism among themselves under a registered-claim logic borrowed from the Homestead Act. The homestead did not end. It turned inward.
UNDERWRITTEN
The full institutional history of federated American public broadcasting, from the 1967 founding through the 2026 dissolution. The federation is not coming back.
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