From Publishers Weekly

Before he is fully awake, Gordon Walker, intellectual manque, failed playwright in his 40s and modestly successful screenwriter-actor, has already consumed his daily hits of valium, alcohol and cocaine. "Stoned, abandoned, desolate," he is a melancholy case, teetering at the edge of the precipice; his wife has fled, his children are estranged, he feels desperately alone. Bereft, he goes to Mexico, where his old love Les Verger, a gifted actress who is herself in thrall to dope, drink and episodic madness, is shooting a picture Walker wrote. From the beginning, the air is filled with portent. Their meeting is delayed, and with each intervening event, the tension and sense of impending doom mount. When they do meet, they will be left to the mercies of their flayed nerves and their inner ruin. The tale is swiftly and expertly told; the momentum is headlong, swirling; the talk stunning, spinning out of its energies and one crackling scene after another. There can be no mistaking that this is the work of a formidably gifted writer. 40,000 first printing; BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Adrift since his wife left him, tasting "death and ruin," screenwriter Gordon Walker needs "a little something to get by on" beyond alcohol and cocaine; so he seeks out his old lover LuAnne, an actress on location in Mexico where she's filming Walker's script of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. A "true" artist who works "without a net," schizophrenic LuAnne is on the verge of a breakdown. Walker survives their explosive reunion and saves himself, but LuAnne acts out her carefully fore shadowed fate. Moviemakingimages of dark and light, illusion and inven tionis the metaphorical frame for this intense, symbolic novel that dramatizes a moral vision of violence and evil in a world where "Things don't work out . . . . They just be. Powerful fic tion by the author of Dog Soldiers , which won the National Book Award in 1975. Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

Narrator Information: Stephen Lang's television credits include recreating his stage role of Happy opposite Dustin Hoffman's Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman; portraying the legendary star in Babe Ruth; and playing the role of a man struggling with an evil force in The Possession of Michael D.

From the Inside Flap

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.

On the cusp of the millennium, Jerusalem has become a battleground in the race for redemption. American journalist Christopher Lucas is investigating religious fanatics when he discovers a plot to bomb the sacred Temple Mount. A violent confrontation in the Gaza Strip, a race through riot-filled streets, a cat-and-mouse game in an underground maze -- as Lucas follows his leads, he uncovers an attempt to seize political advantage that reveals duplicity and depravity on all sides of Jerusalem's sacred struggle. Ambitious, passionate, darkly comic, Damascus Gate is not only Robert Stone's biggest and best novel to date, but a timely and brilliant story of belief, power, salvation, and apocalypse.

Amazon.com Review

In his earlier novels, Robert Stone has taken us to such hot spots as Vietnam, Central America, and that ultimate sinkhole of depravity we call Hollywood. This time around, it's Jerusalem. Given Stone's gift for depicting both political and personal embroilment--indeed, for making the two inextricable--this particular city is an inspired choice. For starters, Jerusalem remains a sacred destination for Muslims, Jews, and Christians and a hotly contested one. It's also a magnet for hustlers, fanatics, and millennial dreamers, a generous assortment of whom populate the pages of Damascus Gate. As always, Stone introduces a (relatively) innocent American into the picture--a journalist named Christopher Lucas. This career skeptic prides himself on his detachment: he prefers the kind of story "that exposed depravity and duplicity on both sides of supposedly uncompromising sacred struggles. He found such stories reassuring, an affirmation of the universal human spirit." Yet Lucas, a lapsed Catholic, has journeyed to Jerusalem at least in part to recharge his devotional batteries. And as he's slowly drawn into a terrorist plot--which involves drugs, arms smuggling, and a plan to blow up the Temple Mount--Lucas sheds his detachment in a hurry. Stone's novel functions as an expert thriller, whose slow, somewhat clunky wind-up is more than compensated for by a brilliant grand finale. It is also, however, a dogged exploration of faith, in which cynics and true believers jostle for predominance. "Life was so self-conscious in Jerusalem," the author reflects, "so lived at close quarters, by competing moralizers. Every little blessing demanded immediate record." It's hard to imagine a more vivid record of these mutual blessings--and maledictions!--than Robert Stone's.

From Publishers Weekly

From its sublime triumphs to its noble failures, Stone's first novel since Outerbridge Reach (1993) is a major work in every aspect, a sprawling, discordant prose symphony. In Jerusalem, which he depicts as a holy Bedlam, Stone finds the perfect setting for the spiritual agonies that have marked his most powerful writing. In that city, everyone suffers from the burden of faith, or lack of it, and everyone wants something, usually at any price. Expat American journalist Christopher Lucas wants a surer identity?born Christian and Jewish, he feels rooted to neither faith?as well as love and, of course, a good story. But his desire has limits, drawn by conscience, and so he serves well as the reader's proxy, a normal man surrounded by seekers of the absolute. Around Lucas swirl addled saints, addicted sinners, con men, cruel members of Hamas and even crueler Israeli security forces. All the parties have their own agendas, most of which hinge on a conspiracy among extremist Israeli Jews and American Christians to blow up the Temple Mount and usher in Armageddon. Stone's presentation of this narrative backbone can be mechanical and sometimes seems extraneous to the novel's main theme of the wages of faith. More captivating is an ancillary plot involving a drug-blasted seeker's attempts to elevate a manic-depressive Jew as a world savior; one of his pawns, Sonia Barnes, an American Sufi who's also Lucas's love interest, proves as compelling as any Stone heroine. Most extraordinary, though, is the author's passionate etching of landscapes both physical and spiritual. The book opens slowly, with a diffuse if portentous ramble through the city, though the narrative intensifies through scenes of terror and moral gravity?particularly in a nightmare Gaza strip inflamed by riot?until Jerusalem and its people coalesce to iridescent indelibility. Bold and bracing, ambitious and inspired, Damascus Gate is, even for its flaws, an astonishment. 100,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is “one of our greatest living writers” (Los Angeles Times). The stories in this new collection share the signature blend of longing, violence, and black humor with which Stone illuminates the dark corners of the human soul. Entire lives are laid bare with remarkable precision, in captivating prose: a screenwriter carries on a decades-long affair with a beautiful actress, whose descent into addiction he can neither turn from nor share; a bored husband picks up a mysterious woman only to find that his ego has led him woefully astray; a world-beating Silicon Valley executive receives an unwelcome guest at his mansion in the hills; a scuba dive takes uneasy newlyweds to a point of no return. Fun with Problems showcases Stone’s great gift: to pinpoint and make real the impulses—by turns violently coercive and quietly seductive—that cause us to conceal, reveal, and betray our truest selves.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Lonely and frustrated lives are explored in this new collection from the National Book Award–winning author of Dog Soldiers. Stone's evocative prose treads through the murky waters of dead dreams and waning hopes, bringing out the pathetic and nasty side of people warped by addiction, sex, violence and time. Characters are almost blind to redemption, like the alcoholic professor-artist of The Archer who lashes out at a world that wants to celebrate him, or the Silicon Valley executive in From the Lowlands who has built a mansion, only to discover that no matter how much of the world you conquer, there's always something hunting you. High Wire, a story about a Hollywood screenwriter's on again/off again affair and friendship with a bipolar actress, condenses the years between the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton into a wrenching treatise on love, addiction, success and failure. Stone doesn't just let his wounded characters whimper in the corner. He turns them loose on a world hard enough to knock them down but indifferent enough to not care about them once they're gone. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

These stories are no feel-good tonic. Stone does not dabble in the heartwarming, but rather mines the depravity of weirdos whose success resides in having not died by the end of the story. In the entanglements Stone crafts, mere survival is no small feat. The stories are witty and diverse and are all unified by some element of brokenness. Whether it be alcoholic painter, drug-guzzling screenwriter, or small-town attorney, each protagonist remains despicable yet demands a certain sympathy. Everyone is broken, but nothing has yet to fall apart. In “High Wire,” a story about the unraveling of a Hollywood set, Stone writes “Suffering is illuminating, as they say, and in my pain I almost learned something about myself.” Each character comes closer and closer to truth, but heartbreakingly, never quite turns the corner. You know they are on the right track though and that makes suffering with these characters enjoyable. The epithet for Fun with Problems could read: folks who don’t fail all of the time. --Blair Parsons

In this towering story about a man pitting himself against the sea, against society, and against himself, Robert Stone again demonstrates that he is "one of the most impressive novelists of his generation" (New York Review of Books). Inviting comparison with the great sea novels of Conrad, Melville, and Hemingway, Outerbridge Reach is also the portrait of two men and the powerful, unforgettable woman they both love - and for whom they are both ready, in their very different ways, to stake everything. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Robert Stone asks questions of our time few writers could imagine and answers them in narratives few readers will ever quite forget."**

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high. Winner of the 1975 National Book Award