Buckeye's Ballet

If Russia and American collaborated on building a dam across the Bering Strait to reverse global warming, what could possibly go wrong? Enjoy the mishaps in the farcical novel Buckeye's Ballet.

Elected president for his entertainment value, Buckeye keeps the spotlight on the White House. When his Russian cronies propose building a dam across the Bering Strait to reverse global warming, he agrees to champion the collaborative project in exchange for choice seats at Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. Creating the dam is simple—and ominous. Just tap volcanic matter by super fracking deep beneath the sea floor, chill the magma into a wall across the Strait, and ignore the seismic shudders. The Alaska boom town at the Bering Build lures a jumble of opportunists including the madam of a time-share brothel, an old-school bookie from Prague, the first bitch on a globe-trotting TV reality show, and a dysfunctional polar bear. Buckeye’s Ballet is satire, farce, and whimsical science fiction cast with quirky comic characters who spoof the world leaders’ petty agendas.

William Kamowski is a professor of literature at Montana State University in Billings. When he isn’t winning converts to the cults of Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen, he is hiking in the Beartooth Mountains with his wife Magdalen, or irking their cat Zoey with dramatic readings of The Cat in the Hat.