David Boles

Verlin Bluffs, Nebraska. For more than a century a Black funeral house has kept the county's dead: washed, carried, and entered by name in a register whose Remarks column holds what no courthouse form would take.

Ottawa, February 2022. Canadian banks freeze the accounts of protest donors without a court order, and people learn at store counters that their cards have stopped working.

To recant is to take back a belief in public, under pressure, in front of the people who demanded the reversal. The word carries an older sense underneath the modern one.

The conquest of Native America is usually told as two thefts, the theft of the land and the killing of the people. Beyond the Burial Tree adds a third, harder to see because it left no acreage and no body count: the seizure of a people's authority over its own dead.

In October 1972, a seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sat on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console and absorbed the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning. He did not know he was being trained. That is the central finding of this book.

Four disembodied cat heads drift through deep space in Life Helmets, searching for their missing bodies. A puppy head who has never had a body searches with them. The soup is stirring in the wrong direction. The quest continues. Whiskerfluff is the captain because someone has to be.

In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres of Nebraska prairie. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his.

On April 23, 2016, a warning went up in a comment thread beneath a blog entry about the ugly laws: the ADA is in danger, and the disabled are being propelled backward. Ten years later came the memorandum that proved the warning right.

In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed an eight-year-old boy a blue armband marked S, for slave, and set the brown-eyed children over him for the day. The next morning the roles reversed. No one in that room was Black. The lesson, the teacher said, was empathy.

A Fractional Fiction Novel. A freelance audio engineer in Columbus, Ohio, is hired to clone the voice of a county commissioner and fabricate a recording of a conversation that never took place.

Everyone is your friend now. The word that once required an altar can be had for a thumb. For fifty years, David Boles ran his life on one blanket rule: if I know you, you are my friend.

A pharmacist's grandson discovers that art is the oldest prescription in Western civilization.

Paris, August 19, 1839. François Arago reads the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process into the joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Within weeks the satirical press is mocking photographers as mechanics and copyists.

An argument against rule by the dead. In January of the year 897, the reigning pope had his predecessor's corpse pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, propped upright, and put on trial in Rome.

You have heard that the human attention span has fallen below a goldfish's. It is one of the most quoted statistics of the digital age, repeated in TED talks and tenth-grade classrooms, in newspaper trend pieces and the pitch decks of companies selling a cure for the affliction they just named.

On January 30, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

Two words in red ink killed a screenplay and began a book. In 1985 a young dramatist sent a teleplay about William Jennings Bryan to a historian for review. It came back with BAD DRAMA scrawled across the title page, and the play was buried.

In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth.

The Brittle Self is a history of one of the oldest fears a mind can hold: that the self is fragile, that it can be seen through, broken, switched off, or shown to be unreal.

Bologna, the 1920s. Giorgio Morandi spends his working life in a small room at 36 Via Fondazza, painting the same bottles and boxes from a low shelf. The objects barely change. The arrangements barely change. What changes across forty years is what Morandi sees in the space between the bottles.