A new article of mine about torture and its (changing) depiction in films about the ancient Romans has been published on The Awl: Now We Are Rome: Ancient Roman torture on film, and modern American torture in the news.

I look specifically at The Sign of the Cross (1932), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and HBO's Rome (2005 & 2007). I also discuss the history of torture both in Rome and the US, and specifically about our troubling representation of torture in movies.

My novel Pantheon has been named "Book of the Week" by the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library.

I'm very honored!

I am also on a new list of NH authors who have volunteered, through the NH Writers' Project to speak to local book groups in 2015.

The "Playing as a Roman in Skyrim" post on my blog is getting some attention and great comments on Reddit and some other places.

Feel free to join in the conversation. Are there any other Roman or ancient world themed games I should be playing?

I have produced six mini "webisodes" of excerpts from Pantheon. Each is done in a different visual style and give an idea of the many flavors, and genres, of the stories of the gods in the novel.

Thanks to generous Kickstarter donors, I was able to hire professional voice actors to read the excerpts. You can think of the videos as visual audiobooks.

To watch the "webisodes", you can click the thumbnail images to the left to open a separate streaming page. You can also view this YouTube playlist which contains them all.

Please like, comment on, and share the videos!

Thank you to the donors! We were funded at 151% in the end, so we have the funds now to create a trailer for Pantheon and six 5-minute "webisodes" with a professional voice actor reading excerpts from the novel. They will be like mini audiobook recordings. When posted to YouTube etc., they will give potential readers an idea of what the book is like.

Look for them to appear soon here and on YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon and other places.

Thank you!

The printed version of Pantheon is now on Amazon.com. It is not cheaper than buying it direct from the publisher, but it is available for Amazon Prime. If you would like to buy it from there, please use the link to the left (which sends a few of Amazon's pennies my way).

An eBook version can be downloaded from iTunes for your iPad, or Barns & Noble for your NOOK reader.

The Companion contains detailed entries on the collections of the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums, the Museo Barracco, and the Palazzo Altemps. Descriptions, historical information, and mythological backgrounds are given for hundreds of artifacts and pieces of art. It also incorporates two detailed day trips that are possible from the city center: Rome's port city Ostia and Hadrian's villa at Tivoli.

Currently it is only available in print edition. An eBook version will be available soon.

Here is the iTunes link and the Barnes & Noble link.

Walking Tours is designed for tourists and scholars who are interested in exploring first-hand the grandeur and magnificence that was ancient Rome through a Humanist, secular, and freethinking lens.

This is the Second Edition text that completely updates all of the text, illustrations, and content of the previous version.

The print version of Pantheon is currently available with a direct deposit discount from the publisher. You can get all 738 pages for less than $20.

You will need to create a free account with the publisher's marketplace to order.

Here is the direct link to the store.