Leaping Dog Press is pleased to announce the publication of Eric Paul Shaffer's Burn & Learn: Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era.

Burn & Learn is a wild tale of five friends attending college, drinking coffee at the Frontier Restaurant, and learning the wisdom of the ages, the era, and the street in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This episodic novel begins where Laurence Sterne and Richard Brautigan left off, introducing a truly amusing and alluring wilderness of words through which readers can blaze their own glorious trials. The novel reveals all in thirteen modes ranging from mythology, science-fiction fables, American koans, Coyote tales, coyote chapters, BookMovie chapters, Missing Lists (and other relevant context), realistic narrative, encyclopedic entries enumerating the details of the Century of Technological Disaster, commentary concerning the Ideal Edition of the novel, a love story, a lost-love story, and parables of four monkish brothers residing in a cabin on the Continental Divide.

Reckless, K.C., King Charles the RagMan, and Rufus (and others) are the central figures in a novel that encompasses all time from the beginning to the end of the universe and examines everything through the brief, flickering frames of 167 short chapters projecting the brilliant moments that sparkle through the lives and glimmer in the darkness above the heads of this handful of friends and a host of mythological, fabulous, cinematic, historic, and literary characters.

Readers can hop, skip, and jump through the book to their heart's, hand's, mind's, and eyes' content. Nothing is missing, even if readers overlook something accidentally, purposely, temporarily, or permanently, and the chapters are best read as constellations in the night sky are read: by making connections between the twinkling lights that fill the darkness that surrounds us.

Burn & Learn is also the most complete sequel currently available to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and one character may even look familiar in color and in black and white. His initials are K.C.

The Periodic Tables of Contents

Below is a list, periodically augmented, of alternate ways to read Burn & Learn, “The Periodic Tables of Contents.”

• Table 002 — The Revelation of Nine-Mile Hill Chapters: A Five-Tire Forward Cross Rotation for Front-Wheel-Drive Automobiles
• Table 012 — The Continuing Adventures of Captain Renew and Agent Orange: Chapters in Order of Appearance and Chronology
• Table 030 — BookMovie Reading Advice Chapters: Chapters in Order of Word Length
• Table 033 — A Periodic Table of Contents: Complete and in Reverse Order
• Table 053 — Coyote Chapters: Chapters in Random Order
• Table 064 — An Anatomy of the Hand: In Digital Order from Backhand-Up Inside-Out
• Table 071 — The Felony Stick: Chapters in Geocentric Order
• Table 086 — Coyote Tales: Chapter Titles in Reverse Title-Length Order
• Table 087 — Fables of the Future: Chapters in Alphabetical Order
• Table 104 — The Asterisks Chapters: Chapter Titles in Alphabetical Order
• Table 105 — Words from Languages Other than English in Chapter Titles: Chapters in Reverse Alphabetical Order
• Table 116 — The King Charles the RagMan Chapters: Chapters in Order of Appearance

Press Release: “Burn & Learn: 54 Cubic Inches of Crazily-Crafted Contemporary Tales in One Novel”