These poems were composed in a desultory manner over the past fifteen years, many since the author's retirement from his law practice in 2007, without giving any thought at the time to collecting them into a book for publication. Some were e-mailed to friends, some languished on scraps of paper in a drawer, others stored in the author's computer while a few remained inchoate, unwritten, mere poetic fragments in the author's mind until he eventually committed them to paper. There is no unifying theme. Each poem stands alone, written in respnse to the specific inspiration of the moment with wide structural diversity in rhyme, meter and versification.

This small volume of 4 short stories, the whole of which can be read in one sitting, takes the reader on what the author hopes will prove a fascinating journey. In the first story, from which the book takes its name, The Interrogation of Ephraim Sparkman, we travel, by the magic of words, through time and space to Mars in the distant future. In The Buddha's Smile we find ourselves in a small Kalmyk village seized by the German SS deep inside the Soviet Union during World War 11. Next, comes The Blame Game. It's 1975 and we are standing with the accused in the dock at the Old Bailey criminal court in London charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The last story, The Rabbi, follows the destiny of a young man from Berlin in 1938 to the battle of Stalingrad in 1943.