Release: The Dream of Poor Bazin
“All tides carry their own riptide,” Stephen writes, “and the wave of populist hate that won this Pyrrhic victory is already rolling back.”
It will never be said of Stephen Price Blair that he spilled any ink with half a heart.
What if the Three Musketeers were journalists in Washington, DC? What if journalists were swashbuckling, swaggering, hard-drinking warriors of truth?
The Dream of Poor Bazin is the story behind one of the greatest political intrigues in history. Maybe you read about it, or rather, what they let you read about it, probably as some minor item buried under the back page corrections among the dry-cleaning ads. What happened in DC during the administration of President Bill Lewis was so incredible that to this day the facts have been suppressed in a massive effort to save political careers from disaster.
Item: Young journalist Stephen Price Blair, up from Charlottesville, engages the three greatest reporters of his age in a barroom brawl within hours of his arrival in DC.
Item: A mysterious elder statesman absconds with Stephen’s letter of introduction to White House Press Secretary Bobby Trevor, leading Stephen on a wild chase throughout the beltway.
Item: Which young journalist with the eye of the President organized the controversial Salons4All symposium series at the Washington Post? Was it the same cub reporter whose landlord was escorted out of his seedy U Street apartment in handcuffs by the United States Postal Inspection Service?
Item: What band of intrepid journos located the missing Warren Fries briefcase—right under the noses of the United States Postal Inspection Service?
Item: If you’re a fan of Dumas’s great adventure or of Waugh’s satirical Scoop, you’ll love The Dream of Poor Bazin.
The Dream of Poor Bazin is the story of Stephen Price Blair’s first beats on the road to the White House Press Corps, all the sweeter for being his first, and all the wilder for being true.
- February 4, 2026: Dream of Poor Bazin audiobook
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The Dream of Poor Bazin is now available as an audiobook on the Apple Bookstore. This is an experiment on my part, but also on Apple’s as near as I can tell. I had to do no more work than just approving the conversion; the reading was auto-generated by Apple using their artificial voice “Warren”, a “Baritone, American accent: Has characteristics typically associated with masculine voicing.”
Warren sounds like a typical pretentious but soft-spoken journalist of the NPR variety, albeit without the fake Brit accent. I’m not sure this voice would work nearly as well if The Dream of Poor Bazin weren’t a satire about pretentious journalists with delusions of public service.
I have not listened to the entire audiobook. I’ve only listened to the preview. Neither Apple nor Draft2Digital, who Apple is working with for this autogeneration experiment, have given me a free copy. I’m also afraid that if I listened to the book I’d want to re-edit the whole thing based on changes in journalism since I released the paperback in 2020.
I do not have time for that, and I also have a strong conviction that books are books of their time; re-editing them several years later can only diminish them. I can’t imagine re-editing It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees, and have put off republishing it for that reason. I immersed myself in a lot of folklore and Southern literature during the process of writing Yankees and I would not even begin to be qualified to edit it today. Even were I to try to replicate that immersion, it would be from a completely different perspective.
“Warren” is obviously a computer, but only barely so. It’s a little more deliberate than I’d like. It pauses at odd points and doesn’t treat commas as a human would, or at least as I would. That said, Warren is not at all robotic. It does a reasonable job of emphasis. It uses sotto voce mostly in the right places. It does not have quite the level of human understanding to know to emphasize “you are a Virginian” more strongly and “you are my son” more affectionately, but it does know that they need a different emphasis than the surrounding text. That alone is impressive.
The Dream of Poor Bazin
- The Dream of Poor Bazin at Goodreads
- Jerry Stratton’s The Dream of Poor Bazin on Goodreads.com.
- The Dream of Poor Bazin (Official Site)
- The Dream of Poor Bazin: A Novel of adventure journalism in Washington, DC.
bookstores
- The Dream of Poor Bazin•: Jerry Stratton at Jerry Stratton on Amazon.com (paperback)
- “All for One and One for All.” When Stephen Price Blair’s letter of introduction to White House Press Secretary Bobby Trevor is stolen by a mysterious Senator, he vows revenge against the most powerful people in DC. He risks his life, and his reputation as a journalist, to protect the President and Vice President from the plots of House Speaker Janet Richardson, and duels the Speaker’s journalists to advance the cause of beltway bipartisanship.
- The Dream of Poor Bazin: Jerry Stratton at Smashwords (ePub)
- Stephen Price Blair risks his life and his reputation as a journalist to protect the President and Vice President from the plots of House Speaker Janet Richardson, and duels the Speaker’s journalists to advance the cause of beltway bipartisanship.
- The Dream of Poor Bazin: Jerry Stratton at Apple Books (ePub)
- Buy The Dream of Poor Bazin on Apple Books.
- The Dream of Poor Bazin: Jerry Stratton at Barnes & Noble (ePub)
- Buy The Dream of Poor Bazin at Barnes & Noble.
- The Dream of Poor Bazin: Jerry Stratton at Kobo (ePub)
- Buy The Dream of Poor Bazin on Kobo.
More The Dream of Poor Bazin
- Dream of Poor Bazin audiobook
- The Dream of Poor Bazin is now available as an audiobook, if you use Apple Books. It is read by their automated voice reader, “Warren”.
- Intellectuals and Society
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- Scoop
- In 1935, Evelyn Waugh traveled to Abyssinia to cover the Second Italo-Abyssinian War for the Daily Mail. He found it absurd enough, up to a point, to be the basis for a satire and combined some of his colleagues into William Boot of the Beast.
- The First Casualty
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- Advise & Consent
- This Senatorial procedural could be straight from Dumas, and the themes hidden in the action are timeless.
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- In 1935, Evelyn Waugh traveled to Abyssinia to cover the Second Italo-Abyssinian War for the Daily Mail. He found it absurd enough, up to a point, to be the basis for a satire and combined some of his colleagues into William Boot of the Beast.
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