Oliver's Travels

Today is the official publication day for this book. I'm the author, so I'm not going to review it, but here are what some other folks had to say: In Oliver’s Travels, Clifford Garstang deftly explores the fragility of memory. Ollie, an aspiring writer, must navigate the mundane while, at the same ti......more

OLIVER’S TRAVELS is a unique and fascinating novel which was impossible to put down. It is exquisitely written, often with a wry sense of humor until unexpectedly, the young man protagonist explodes in grief and regret. When he does not hide, the passion which comes from Ollie is amazing. The story......more

While the title points to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the journey that the book chronicles is something much more endearing and less self-congratulating than Swift could have imagined. Garstang's Oliver's Travels calls up Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Homer's fatherless son, Te......more

"For a long time I've harbored a fantasy . . . of being a writer." Post college, our hero Ollie flounders, wishing he could write a novel, so one day he creates an alternate universe character in his journal, based on his fantasy life. His "Oliver" travels foreign lands, wins fair ladies, and has th......more

Ollie is in that limbo space between graduating from college and being launched in life. He moves in with his mother in a small town, teaching as an adjunct and dating a woman he is ambivalent about, while being haunted by the existential questions posed by his philosophy professor-mentor about the......more