To keep the entire corpus of Matthew Rapaport’s work together, I cannot fail to mention this book attributed to Anonymous & Anonymous. Make no mistake. Mr. Rapaport is one of its authors. Yes, only one of them.
In the mid-2000s, Matthew had an affair with a married woman whose real name and location still cannot be revealed. Known only as J., he discovered she was a good writer of erotica and they conspired to co-create an experimental novella in which each party uses a paragraph or two to describe some part of a scene, the paragraphs alternating between Matthew (M) and J as they proceed through the story. To separate the two voices, each author’s part is written in a different font and signaled with an M or J.
The story concept is simple: a man travels from the West Coast to the Midwest to buy a house for his family because his job is to be transferred there. His realtor, J, meets him at the airport and they go off together looking at houses. Each finds the other attractive, and back in his hotel room, Matthew seduces J. As it turns out, J, married for 25 years, does not have a great sex life in her marriage and lustfully craves the orgasms Matthew’s tongue delivers. What follows is a weekend of house hunting punctuated by a lot of over-the-top explicit sex.
Unlike Matthew’s other novels, The Out of Town Buyer is not a story mixed with a lot of sex. Rather, the sex is the story! As an experiment, it works well. Matthew did all the editing, but J’s voice comes through nicely, the two complimenting one another well. The story, written in 2005 wasn’t published until 2012 when Amazon publishing came to Matthew’s attention.
As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.
Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (his television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.
Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.
Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.
My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!
The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”
The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.
Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.
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Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.
As of January 2016 I have 3 books published for Amazon Kindle. These are “Kindle Only” books for now meaning you can’t get a paper copy. But if you are reading this then you have the technology to read these. The “Kindle App” is free and available on just about any phone, tablet, or computer on the market anywhere in the world today.
Below I briefly describe the three books. If anyone is interested in discussing them, please comment here and I will start up a book-specific category to continue the discussion. General discussion about all of them (they are related after all) can take place in the comment stream below. Each book title (below) serves as a link to the book on Amazon.
This book was the outcome of some few years of readings by today’s physicists and philosophers on the broad subjects of cosmology, physics (quantum mechanics, relativity, especially the nature of time), and the puzzling nature of consciousness. It is also based on what might be called a theory of God found in “The Urantia Book” published in 1955 by The Urantia Foundation but now in the public domain. Some very good Kindle editions (click on the book title link above) of this book are only a few dollars on Amazon. My own book begins with a brief (and very over-simplified) sketch of the nature of God as presented in “The Urantia Book”. I use just enough of that book’s metaphysics of God to demonstrate that it properly accounts for the present physics we understand (relativity and quantum mechanics) and in addition it accounts for the presence and content of consciousness. With these in place I go on to discuss the “human experience” both personally (as a subjective individual) and historically (the human collective on Earth).
None of this discussion is taken to be any sort of “proof of God”. Rather, it is an attempt to show that by fitting all of what we experience under this particular sketch of God’s nature we can not only explain what we experience, but are justified in inferring something of what must occur in our (possibly very distant) future.
In early 2015 Roberto M. Unger and Lee Smolin released a seminal book: “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time”. In this book they argued (separately) that time was in fact the principle characteristic of the physical universe, even more so than space. They are both very articulate and make their case well. There is nothing theological about their view, indeed Smolin explicitly rejects any chain of explanation that points “outside the physical universe”. I wrote a review of this book that can be found on Amazon with this link.
I thought the Unger/Smolin book deserved a more extended review than I could work-up for Amazon. That led to my second book: ‘A Theological Reflection on “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time” (Unger/Smolin 2015)’ The extended review takes up the first half of my little book here while the second half is a commentary on something I noticed when reading the Unger/Smolin book. My own first book also afirms the “reality of time”. That is, in it, I conclude that one of the consequences of The Urantia Book’s theory of God as I sketch it is that time must be real and must more or less have the qualities that Unger and Smolin both believe it has.
More or less, but not entirely. In particular, I note that what is differs between us cannot be reliably tested. The idea that time begins with this universe and the big bang or that time retreates indefinately into a past beyond the beginning of our present universe are equally unmeasurable. If Unger and Smolin are right, then the conditions of the transitions from “one universe phase to another” as Unger puts it, are so severe as to preclude our ever having evidence that could only emerge from a past universe. In the second half of my book I discuss implications of this difficulty for Unger and Smolin. The bottom line is that whether you take a theological view of time’s beginning or a “time goes back indefinately” view there will be no way in principle of ever telling the difference observationally. Anything that might be taken as evidence of a “past before the present universe” might easily be a phenomenon resulting from the extreme conditions at the opening of the present universe.
My third book is something of a combination of the first two. In the year and a half between the first and third books I read more books on the subject of quantum mechanics, cosmology (particularly the Unger/Smolin book), consciousness, and theology. As in my readings prior to the writing the first book, much of the discussion in these books came down to the relation between time, causal closure, the evolution of consciousness, and the nature (and possibility) of free will. Using the Unger/Smolin hypothesis of time’s fundamental reality and the evolution of cosmological constants and laws, the third book sets the sketch of The Urantia Book’s theory of God into a context of physical transformations in cosmological history. I distinguish two broad kinds of transformations called “small” or “little” and “large” or “big” emergences.
Small emergences are new qualities in the physical universe that appear automatically when physical conditions are right and all the necessary ingredients are present. A well known example are the qualities of liquid and solid (ice) water that are not to be found among the properties of hydrogen and oxygen alone nor their behavior as a gas.
Big emergences require something more than merely a combination of physical ingredients under the right conditions. They require additional information. No one disputes that additional information is necessary for the physical universe to have life and then consciousness. Rather the dispute is over from whence that information comes. Without something like God, it can only appear by accident and the issue then turns to whether that is likely or even possible. In the first book, information theory was addressed separately from other parts of the investigation. In this book, it is more central. There is less cosmology here but a greater emphasis on the distinction between our epistemological arena (what we can know in our experience) and what we must infer exists metaphysically thanks to certain qualities of human consciousness. In particular the phenomenon of self-consciousness, timeless identity of the person, and the scope of free will are examined in more detail. Free will of the human variety is more fully distinguished from that exercised by animals, and it is more extensively related to the purposelessness of physical mechanism under causal closure.
I know that most of those who follow my blogging so far (mostly about my other hobbies) are not as deeply interested in these subjects as I am. Those of you who might take an interest, and particularly those who come here seeking a discussion forum about these books are welcome to comment and start that discussion.
“Why This Universe: God, Cosmology, Consciousness, and Free-Will”
‘A Theological Reflection on “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time” (Unger/Smolin 2015)’ 
“God, Causal Closure, and Free Will”
Ruminations 