The Georgie Gust Exhibit

I completed Chance Encounter while undergoing a dark, deep experience with depression, existential despair and with new tears for old grief. So many people appreciate this film’s inherent beauty. I thank you, all, to God, and to all my fans, friends, and family for playing such a unique role in these short experimental pieces, although perhaps without knowing it. The holiday seasons often bring al...

I completed The Morning After in December 2014 while undergoing a dark, deep experience with depression, existential despair and with new tears for old grief. I am glad to see so many people have appreciated my movies’ inherent beauty, especially this one, which has such a profoundly personal meaning. I thank you, all, for God, and to all my fans, friends, and family for playing such a unique role...

In a public restroom, the camera pans the closed doors of 4 stalls; the first has an "out of order" sign on it. We hear a gaseous noise, and one by one, three musicians (a guitar player, a bass player, and a trumpet player all wearing tuxedos) flush the toilets and come out of the stalls revealing their musical instruments. Finally, the last to be disclosed is an old lady, Pat (from the "out of or...

What lengths will a couple go to just for a night out?

After ten years of separation, former prep school sweethearts meet coincidentally and discuss their hopes and dreams together in Long Island, New York. They spend the night together but move in their separate ways by the morning as they struggle with inner conflicts.

George wanders into a wax museum on the exhibit's last day. The museum comes alive. The mood turns steamy as different fantasies come into play. A sobering sense of the inevitable begins to emerge. He's getting married, but to whom?

Larry, alone and disheveled, walks the streets then boards a city bus, where he proceeds to disturb the passengers with his erratic behavior and verbal outbursts. Disturbing the passengers doesn’t really concern Larry, as one-by-one they each disappear, and Larry finds himself off the bus and in the office of a psychologist, who pushes for information, asking again and again if anything “out of th...

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for thirty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there i...

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for thirty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there i...

"Be a doer and not a critic," Tony Blair once said. Pastiche, it is, in response to the heavily criticized and controversial author Jonathan Harnisch's (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc.) work and life. He offers this colossal work of erotic literary art that mixes styles, materials, etc., wildly varied in style and content. "I am a troubled man," the author confesses, "with feelings. I am not good, bu...

"Be a doer and not a critic," Tony Blair once said. Pastiche, it is, in response to the heavily criticized and controversial author Jonathan Harnisch's (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc.) work and life. He offers this colossal work of erotic literary art that mixes styles, materials, etc., wildly varied in style and content. "I am a troubled man," the author confesses, "with feelings. I am not good, bu...

"Be a doer and not a critic," Tony Blair once said. Pastiche, it is, in response to the heavily criticized and controversial author Jonathan Harnisch's (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc.) work and life. He offers this colossal work of erotic literary art that mixes styles, materials, etc., wildly varied in style and content. "I am a troubled man," the author confesses, "with feelings. I am not good, bu...

"Be a doer and not a critic," Tony Blair once said. Pastiche, it is, in response to the heavily criticized and controversial author Jonathan Harnisch's (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc.) work and life. He offers this colossal work of erotic literary art that mixes styles, materials, etc., wildly varied in style and content. "I am a troubled man," the author confesses, "with feelings. I am not good, bu...

A young man battling extreme mental illness brings his sadomasochistic fantasies to life in Harnisch's (Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia, 2014, etc.) latest novel. As this riveting story opens, Georgie Gust, a suicidal Tourette's syndrome patient, tells his doctor he wants to leave the mental institution where he's been committed. When the doctor puts him off, Gust finds himself buffeted by violent f...

Living Colorful Beauty is a twisted, intensely character-driven ride. In Living Colorful Beauty, author Jonathan Harnisch tells the story of Ben, a man diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome, schizoaffective disorder, and several other issues. Ever since his youth, Ben has been both plagued by mental illness and obsessed with venality. As he navigates through an unstable, directionless life and leaves...

A boarding school student with Tourette's syndrome looks for the meaning of life in this offbeat novella. This is recommended to fans of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. When We Were Invincible details the experiences of Georgie Gust at the fictional St. Michael's Academy, a prestigious East Coast boarding school. In the vein of Catcher in the Rye, the novella focus...

A young man battling extreme mental illness brings his sadomasochistic fantasies to life in Harnisch's (Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia, 2014, etc.) latest novel....The novel plunges readers into the mind of a man at war with its own urges, memories, and sexual obsessions... Despite the garishness, brutality, and squalor of many passages ... sophisticated readers will appreciate the extraordinary fe...

At the opening of Living Colorful Beauty, the reader is presented with two protagonists. There’s Ben, the narrator of the preface, who relates the story of the awful sex education classes he sat through in middle school and of his subsequent discovery of his father’s collection of pornography; and then there’s Georgie, a sexual submissive with a foot fetish, who is obsessed with his beautiful and...

A boarding school student with Tourette's syndrome looks for the meaning of life in this offbeat novella. This is recommended to fans of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. When We Were Invincible details the experiences of Georgie Gust at the fictional St. Michael’s Academy, a prestigious East Coast boarding school. In the vein of Catcher in the Rye, the novella focus...

Ben Schreiber knew Wakefield Academy would be a disaster before he even arrived. It would be the same as his last school--the taunting, the judgment, the panic at being an all-too-obvious schizophrenic in a crowd of teenage brats hungry for a target. His fears are confirmed the moment he steps out of his parent's rusty car to the mocking sneers of his posh classmates. So what does Ben do? He retre...

Author Jonathan Harnisch often writes about alter egos who live with the same mental disorders that he does, including schizophrenia and Tourette's syndrome. The protagonist of this coming- of-age novel is Georgie Gust, a character who has appeared in the author's previous novels as a sexual fetishist and even another character's alter ego. For readers who may have explored other Harnisch novels,...

Equal parts existential nihilism and fetishistic erotica, this darkly hypnotic novel--in which the lines between reality and delusion are hopelessly blurred--chronicles a mentally ill man's search for meaning in his life, or at least some kind of profound corporeal satisfaction. Georgie Gust, who has Tourette's syndrome and may be schizophrenic, is also a hardcore masochist and foot fetishist and...

BEN SCHREIBER suffers from a range of physical and psychiatric disorders, ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to narcissism, borderline personality, and schizoaffective disorder. He is hospitalized after a drug-crazed attempt at a bank robbery and is now under the care of Dr C, a female psychiatrist. Ben has little faith that psychiatric medicine will help him rid his mind of the delusions and halluc...

This is the story of John Marshall, an ambitious and troubled young man determined to climb to the top of New York high society while spreading chaos and misery in his wake. Raised in a household of drunken abuse, John has little hope of anything but a factory job. Then he has an intimate encounter with an enticing woman who gets everything she wants through seduction—and the experience changes Jo...

Benjamin J. Schreiber has left rehab, but isn't out of the woods. His life, plagued by schizophrenic personalities and Tourette's, exists in series of maddening hallucinogenic episodes that combine his deepest insecurities with dark fantasies. In every one of these manic flashes, the same characters appear Georgie, the alter-ego living in Ben's body, and Claudia, the object of his twisted desires...