This Mobius Strip of Ifs is the winner of the 2012 National Indie Excellence Awards in the non-fiction category of autobiography/memoirs.

From the author: I authored The i Tetralogy, a Holocaust novel, winner of the Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award, and Down to a Sunless Sea, a collection of short fiction, finalist for the Indie Excellence Book Awards.

This Mobius Strip of Ifs, a new book of essays and memoirs written over four decades, a kind of  Bilsdungroman of my psychological life as a writer, psychotherapist, spiritual seeker, and teacher was published in February.

Midwest Book Review writes: We often live in lives of regret and unfulfilled dreams. "This  Mobius Strip of Ifs" is a collection of essays from Mathias B. Freese as he discusses American culture and how we determine our goals and dreams, as well as our doubts. Speaking clearly on this history and offering much pondering on the nature of the truths of the world, "This Mobius Strip of Ifs" is a thoughtful and inspirational collection of essays on psychology, philosophy, and thought, very much recommended. 

Synopsis: A mixture of the author’s reminiscences, insights, observations, and criticism, This Möbius Strip of Ifs examines the use and misuse of psychotherapy, childhood trauma, complicated family relationships, his frustration as a teacher, and the enduring value of tenaciously writing through it all. Freese scathingly describes the conditioning society imposes upon artists and awakened souls.

Henry James and the Joys of Binge Reading

By CHARLES-ADAM FOSTER-SIMARD

During a recent semester spent studying abroad in the UK, I had the opportunity to take an undergraduate course on Henry James. I seized the chance, having never taken a class devoted to a single author before. Previously, Henry James had existed in my mind as a hazy legend in Anglo-American letters who wrote hefty novels and dense stories in an ominously opaque prose. The only thing I had ever read of his was “The Middle Years”, a short story about an aging writer resting in Bournemouth, who befriends a doctor who also happens to be a fervent admirer of his work. It sounds awfully boring but I was impressed by the story, which reveals a great deal about reader-writer relations, although of course I found the writing itself a little impenetrable at times (the number of commas in the first sentence alone would send a good number of readers packing). It’s easy to lose your way in a James story if you’re not careful. Your eyes keep scanning the words, but your thoughts tend to wander off. Often what’s literally happening is buried beneath endless looping sentences, words that lap like waves, eddies of thoughts and counter-thoughts. It all sounds beautiful, but the reader is left wondering: what does it actually mean?

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Five Stories and Two Essays

Taken from Barnes & Noble:

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.

Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his New Directions translations of Roberto Bolaño.