MARCH 2026

Yeah, I’m Still Here

You’d think that, now that I have my second novel coming out, I’d be bombarding all you amazing people with these newsletters every damn month. I can hear the whispers and shouts of incensed book marketing aficionados in my ears as I type (and it ain’t helping). I’d like to say life got in the way, but the fact is, the aficionados are justified: I just need to get my priorities straight. So…let’s go.

Stuff is Happening

For my local peeps, I’ll be taking part in the Rinconada Book Fair at the Rinconada Library in Palo Alto on Saturday, April 4th. The fair runs from noon to 4:00 p.m., and I’ll be appearing with three other local writers at 1:00 in a panel discussion titled “The Shape of the Story: How Writers Choose the Right Form.” I plan to share wisdom both my first book The Cyclone Release and my forthcoming upmarket political thriller Tristan 4 America. (Don’t know what “upmarket” means? Come on out on April 4th and find out!)

I also want to highly recommend to my fellow Bay Area denizens that you set aside April 19th at 4:00 p.m. to attend Danielle Girard’s appearance at Book Passage Corte Madera. Danielle, a dear friend, a fellow Queens University of Charlotte MFA graduate, and a brilliant novelist, will be in conversation with JJ Elliott discussing her stunning new novel Pinky Swear, which New York Times bestselling author Jeneva Rose calls “visceral, tense, and shocking” and “an absolute must read.” I hope to see you there!

Back in early March, on the 4th through the 7th, to be exact, I was able to reconnect with many of my favorite people from Queens University of Charlotte. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (which strangely claims the acronym “AWP”) held its annual conference in Baltimore, and the city that claimed the life of Edgar Allen Poe brought me back together with not just my favorite fellow vertically gifted friend Colin Foote Burch, but also Fred Leebron, the director and creator of the Queens program, and fellow novelists and writers from those late-in-life college days. And it wasn’t all partying and reminiscing either; I made new friends and professional connections, and learned a ton, particularly about book promotion and marketing—something that is rather germane as I prepare for the release of my second novel.

Tristan 4 America – The Latest

In the meantime, this is what readers are saying:

“After a sudden layoff from the tech company he helped build, a restless executive launches a quixotic bid for the presidency—less out of conviction than calculation. The campaign is meant to be brief, profitable, and forgettable. But along the way, Tristan begins speaking plainly about inequality, Christian nationalism, and abortion rights. Young voters, hearing something rare in American politics—logic joined with moral urgency—start to listen. Crowds grow. Expectations shift. And as Tristan’s unlikely movement gathers momentum, darker forces emerge, determined to silence him. What began as a scheme becomes a reckoning: with power, with ambition, and with the fragile promise of democracy itself. Bruce Overby’s new novel, Tristan 4 America, is a wild, twisty ride that kept me engaged from start to finish and even had me wishing the book’s protagonist was on my ballot!”

— Clifford Garstang, author of Oliver’s Travels and The Last Bird of Paradise

“Overby’s riveting rollick careens from humor to tragedy and from cynicism to idealism as his savvy tech bro struggles to reconcile the American dream with our wrenching political time. Amid the pathos, snappy dialog, and fireworks, Overby also delivers a primer on campaigns and some compelling visions.”

— Charles Robbins, Author of The Accomplice and co-author, with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, of The U.S. Senate

“Squarely confronting the hot-button issues that shape our nation, Overby lays down a thought-provoking playbook for an improved, more humane America. A crackling political satire that is both irreverent and relatable, Tristan 4 America has got my vote.”

— Dean Monti, author of The Monosexual and The Sweep of the Second Hand

The Genesis of Tristan 4 America

I wrote Tristan 4 America, a story rooted in American politics, for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important one is that politics has been in my blood and brain since way, way back in the day. I vividly remember, for instance, the U.S. presidential election of November 1968, when many in the generation that had, over the preceding five years, suffered the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. looked on in horror as Richard Nixon handily defeated Hubert Humphrey, the U.S. Senator from Minnesota and Vice President to Lyndon Johnson. I also remember how the upstart campaign of former Alabama Governor George Wallace marked 1968 as the apex of the Republican Party’s “southern strategy,” the concerted effort that turned millions of southern racists, formerly Democrats, into loyal Republicans.

I was nine years old in November 1968.

In October 1969, our parents took my two older brothers and I to San Francisco to march in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, where I was in awe at my first close-up look at real hippies, and awestruck even more by the unified voices of 250,000 Americans calling out for peace and love and an end to a tragic and corrosive war. Our parents must have been strongly motivated by the fact that my brother was 14 at this time when 17-year-olds were being conscripted and sent to die in faraway jungles. That year alone, the first year of Nixon’s term, 10,000 Americans had died in the war.

I was ten years old in October 1969.

And in the summer of 1973, the year of Richard Nixon’s disgrace, I sat with my mother and watched every minute of the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Activities, generally known as the Watergate Committee. The committee’s investigation of the Nixon Campaign’s break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters in June of the previous year was a master class in the three branches of government, government malfeasance, the oversight responsibilities of the Congress, and the immense power and influence of charismatic and ethical leaders like Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina (a Democrat) and Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee (a Republican). That summer was, for me, a step into adulthood and a transition in my relationship with my mother, whose political fervor was by then well-developed while mine was still forming.

I was 13 years old in the summer of 1973.

From that foundation of my youth, I would go on to minor in political science in college, to pen dozens of posts about politics on my blog, Deucerman at Random, and on Medium, and yes, to write a novel about our current fraught political moment.

A Word on Community

Both of my parents were from Minnesota, and the Catholic church our family attended was not only a haven for allies in the Civil Rights movement, but also a bastion of protest against the Vietnam War. Communities in those days gathered to demand justice, to end police brutality, and to bring an end to the war—not unlike the gatherings, in these troubled times, of communities around the country—most profoundly in Minnesota—who are rising up in defense of their neighbors and expelling the government thugs who have descended on our streets.

But the concept of community has changed over time. Community, in prehistoric times, enabled our species to dominate the earth. By banding together to share resources, early humans were able to overwhelm bigger, stronger, faster species, but time and technology have changed all that. Humans tamed beasts, built wagons, then ships, then airplanes, and fanned out across the earth, and our communities became dispersed. We are no longer in community with the people in our neighborhood, or even in our town or city. We’re now in community with those from the same school or with the same job or interests. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Dispersed communities can be every bit as strong as those nearby, and familiarity and even intimacy with faraway cultures without the need for onerous days or weeks of travel has, over time, melted away tensions between nations and peoples. Still, who hasn’t, at one time or another, lamented the fact that “we don’t talk to our neighbors anymore”?

It's a complex picture, certainly, but there is one type of modern community, one that seems to have grown in recent decades, that humanity can do without, and that is the community of the super-rich.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that billionaires hang with billionaires. They fly together on private jets, bouncing from one to the other of their many houses, or availing themselves of the exclusive resorts, accommodations, and public events that are increasingly catering to them and them only. Having long since “escaped” the town or city that reared them, they exist in a “community” all their own. And now, with the release of the Epstein files, we have, in full view, thousands of vivid examples of the corrosive incentives that drive these super-rich communities and ignore or exploit or heap scorn on the millions and billions of mere mortals that surround them.

Perhaps the most important thing about the broad exposure the Epstein files have given to the avarice and immorality of the billionaire class is how widely the word is spreading. Millions of Americans who never thought much about billionaires before, or who just accepted them as an inevitable feature of capitalism, are now realizing that we don’t really need them. We’ve discovered that, in fact, they are a cancer on us all, sucking up disproportionate amounts of natural and human resource and precious attention.

My prediction, in fact, is that the Billionaire Tax Proposal that will go before California voters this year is just a beginning. The initiative will pass in a landslide, and all the adverse effects the billionaires and their minions in media and politics are warning us about—billionaire exodus from the state, suppressed job creation, drains on the California economy, etc.—will never come to pass. And with any luck, the new law will signal a new approach that will spread across the nation as so many good things that start in California often do.

Heard in the Wild

These are some quotes that I’ve heard over the past few months that have stuck with me:

“Trump wants Greenland because Greenland has everything a society needs, except the people.” (Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, “The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart”, 1/21/26)

“We’re not trapped in here with Trump. Trump is trapped in here with us.” (Jon Lovett, “Lovett or Leave It,” 1/31/26)

In case you missed them, previous editions of the Bruce Overby newsletter can be viewed online here.

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