Robert Bagg: Poems, Greek Plays, Essays, Novels, Memoir

VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES follows a newlywed couple, Adam and Lisa Bond, living in 1958 in Cap 'Antibes, France as they are welcomed with alarming warmth into a colony of charismatic expat Brits, and who soon become involved with both violent factions fighting the Algerian War. Adam, an aspiring poet, retraces the swathe cut by the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the Murphy's through Europe in the 1920's, and as he and his buddy, Lee Raphael, a mime on a Fulbright to Paris, tour through France, Spain and Tangiers, they bring woe on themselves, their loved ones, and into Adam's poems. I have temporarily removed the text of VILLA from the site and will replace it with a revised and shorter version.

OSTRAKON: Prologue and Chapter One, takes the reader into Jack Stonecroft's study fifteen minutes before the worst crisis of his life erupts, one that threatens to destroy not only his career, but him. OSTRAKON is an academic novel that dramatizes what professors actually do in their working lives: the teaching, the research, the intellectual camaraderie, the political infighting, and the inevitable sexual chemistry between professors and students, into which mix reflexive vitriol is poured by both the genuinely and the pseudo scandalized. Jack fights his way, misstep by misstep, into a corner from which there's no escape, except the one his academic discipline has trained him to attempt.