Books by G.V. Loewen
New Release!
Got Action: Book Three of the Queen of Hearts Trilogy
“Stand down, drop your weapon!” Make me, almighty officer of the peace. And what peace is that which abuses children in the name of discipline, sends poor people off to martyr themselves for an elite nation state, defends policy that allows the rich to get richer and the poor only further poverty, and stockpiles technology – speaking of weapons – that can destroy all life on earth? Riddle me this, folks.” (From Got Action: Book Three of the Queen of Hearts Trilogy)
In the final installment of the dark-fantasy trilogy Queen of Hearts, G.V. Loewen allows the reader not a moment to breathe. From the shocking opening scene of resurrection through necrophilia, to the stunning double climax that radically rewrites both Camelot and Calvary, the four loyal friends of Guinevere and their allies finally understand the stakes and scope of their quest.
The question of the history of the world is the same question as is the future of that same world, and on behalf of the entire species, the heroines do not let anyone, or anything, stand in their way to vouchsafe both.
“I have never encountered any novel that compresses narrative so that not only is your heart racing along with that within the breast of each character, but that this very breathlessness is designed to make one realize just how desperate is our own reality. No mere allegory, Queen of Hearts is literally the story of who we are, at this specific historical moment. In the meantime, the climactic final volume grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the final pages. Got action? Yes, we do.” – Avinash Pillay, co-founder of IEC and Vigilance Digital Media, Inc.
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The Work of Warning: And other essays on the question of critique
Philosophy, Cultural Criticism
“In dreaming desire, there are no real consequences. In order to make such fantasies real, we must disarm and thence dismiss no less than history along with biography. The perpetrators dream awake. This is how they can commit the impassioned acts of horror upon the others who now appear to them as mere projections, in their way or submissive, it matters not. It is not a case of decorum managing desire, or even compassion trumping the passions. It is rather that the vision of primordial Man has been reconstructed, and at cost, in the picayune and rationalized manner which modernity requires of it. No less costly than the first murder, the most recent one is yet less authentic since it is so seldom necessary. I am no longer an endangered species. In my fullest presence, I have become the one who endangers, and mine ownmost death can only be owned in life by the killing of others. This is the unreasoned monstrosity of a faux-phenomenological phantasy: that there are no unwilling victims, that I no longer dream alone.” (from The Work of Warning)
In this, his sixth essay collection, G.V. Loewen confronts both the ground of the self-absorbed culture and the meta-narrative such a culture tells itself in order to rationalize its order. The range of topics includes transgenderedness, anti-Semitism, the state of higher education, ‘wokeness’, personhood, and love. The critical conceptualizations that backdrop these many-facetted studies include those sociolinguistic, ethical, epistemological, and theological, among others. New insights into such taboos as child pornography and the “Jewish Question,” as well as illuminatingly personal statements on both teaching and writing, make The Work of Warning a memorably diverse journey.
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Her Ownmost Lives: Book Two of the Queen of Hearts Trilogy
“Amy was in tears now, shaking and distraught. Anne’s adorable little head had popped over the side of the pit in dismay, doing its best impression of one of those baroque cherubs except with the weight of an equally baroque fate upon it. Kent’s brows were in the ionosphere and me, well. For a minute, for longer, I thought I had completely lost it, for the body we had just uncovered bore utterly no resemblance to my perfectly lovely late sister, no resemblance at all.” (from Her Ownmost Lives, QH2)
With the narrative taken over by Gwynne’s bereaved younger sister – the acerbic Melissa, who is also, unbeknownst to herself, Guinevere’s legendary half-sister Gwendolyn – the four remaining young women must at once discover the meaning of their leader’s testament, and avoid being discovered by the police while continuing their own life-and-death battle against those who, with Gwynne’s apparent death, are now in the ascendant. With both family and school at critical risk, as well as their own sanity, they turn to not only the arts of war and magic, but also, and most importantly, to art itself, to measure their worthiness against the coming void.
“Book 2 of the dark urban fantasy trilogy Queen of Hearts is nothing less than heart-stopping in its action and heartfelt in its emotion. With a guttural intonation and journeys far beneath your usual adventure-tale gutters, the heroines seek to avenge their leader’s demise while at the same time stop history from folding in on itself. Absolutely current in its themes, Her Ownmost Lives leaves us hanging off a cosmic-scale precipice by which only the intense gravity of the concluding volume could save us.” – Avinash Pillay, COO, Insightful Ethics Communications, Ltd.
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Only Love Is Real: Book One of the Queen of Hearts Trilogy
Only love is real. A noble sentiment. But what, exactly, are its implications? Does it mean that all else is unreal, as in fake? As in fraudulent, as in a lie? Or unreal as in truly intolerable, unlivable, tragic, horrifying? Or is it only surreal, the world a simulacrum of feeling, sentimental and cloying? Or could it be hyper-real, like parents loving their children too much, children unable to love as a result? What is the reality of human love?
Finding herself set down amid the manifold sentiments of the human heart, fifteen-year-old Guinevere Daniels is about to find out.
“One would think that the Arthurian cast could contain no more creative fuel, but in portraying them as realistic residents of a pre-Christian worldview, with all of its savage honor and vicarious vengeance, Loewen’s innovative hybrid YA novel, the first of a trilogy, does in fact strike one as uniquely original, and is at once as horrifying and as enlightening as readers now expect of the philosophical author. His heroine is also both of these embodied, alternating between grotesque violence made all the more disconcerting in its justification, and a super-human compassion for victims of all kinds, especially the young, which also finds itself partially sabotaged by her own desires. Or is it we who are so limited as to imagine that love is always good, always beautiful, and indeed, always only human?” – Avinash Pillay, COO of Insightful Ethical Communications, Ltd.
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Investigations, Insights, Indictments: Critical Essays
Cultural Criticism, Philosophy
“The loss of wider purpose in our cosmology is no technical deficit. Though we loathe nostalgia of all kinds, and history does not run backwards, nevertheless we feel a deeper absence, even to the point of the encounter with the ‘abyss of meaning.’ Gazing into it, however, we find after all that it cuts both ways; there is an absence of ultimate order and meaning, no primer at the outset, no summa upon completion, but there is, almost instead and in its stead, a plethora of meanings, from which each of us can gather the glinting sheaves of meaningfulness. And if it was doubt that first fulminated against goal, against the telos of thought and of life besides, we have retrieved the question as our unique manner of understanding this condition, both meaningful for us and meaningless for the universe.” (From the book’s introduction.)
“In his fifth book of collected critical essays, social philosopher G.V. Loewen, the writer with the most breadth and volume of any in his generation, asks a series of related questions. Why are we seeing an uptick in internecine social violence? What are the factors involved in decoying us from our authentic selves? How are these politically manipulated? And why are many of us so taken with the idea that selfhood is something to be shunned rather than lived? Yet these most serious contemporary topics are handled with wit, verve, and a directness of prose that will engage even the most passive of readers. With titles such as ‘The Lap Dancing Drag Queen of Oz,’ ‘The Trouble with Tribal,’ ‘Bring me the “head” of Sergio Garcia,’ and ‘The Ballot and Bullet Ballet,’ the themes of Investigations, Insights, Indictments will strike you as both immediate and enduring.” – Avinash Pillay, COO of Vigilance Digital Media
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