The Teachings

My novel Ishmael was a slow starter. In its early years it had only a few thousand readers. But those thousands told tens of thousands, the tens of thousands told hundreds of thousands, and the hundreds of thousands told millions. Ishmael was just the first course, however. The rest of the meal was still to come -- in Providence, The Story of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization. But, though I didn't stop with Ishmael, most of my readers did. Very few of them went on to sample any of the later courses. That's why I decided to put this book together. It's a collection of appetizers, generous samples of all the books that followed Ishmael -- and of the books that came BEFORE Ishmael. Reading here, you'll see that in earlier writings -- Tales of Adam and The Book of the Damned -- I accomplished some things that I never managed to surpass in any of the later books (including Ishmael).