Ring in a River

Ring in a River drops a newly disenfranchised Iowa philosophy professor into Austin, Texas, in April 1962, and follows him into a life of jazz, ornithology, madness, and self-redefinition. It is one of Eckhard Gerdes's early novels, published in 1992 under Depth Charge Press, the imprint he founded in 1986 and hand-assembled in its first years.

Gerdes describes his technique plainly as "how I think": prose that disregards conventional time, space, and causality to follow a character through fear toward something past it. The book is more concerned with the motion of a mind than with a plot in the conventional sense, and the looseness is the method, not its by-product.