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Burn & Learn: Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era
Fiction. BURN & LEARN is a wild tale of five friends attending college, drinking coffee at the Frontier Restaurant, and learning the wisdom of the ages, the era, and the street in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This episodic novel begins where Laurence Sterne and Richard Brautigan left off, introducing a truly amusing and alluring wilderness of words through which readers can blaze their own glorious trails. The novel reveals all in thirteen modes ranging from mythology, science-fiction fables, American koans, Coyote tales, coyote chapters, BookMovie chapters, Missing Lists (and other relevant context), realistic narrative, encyclopedic entries enumerating the details of the Century of Technological Disaster, commentary concerning the Ideal Edition of the novel, a love story, a lost-love story, and parables of four monkish brothers residing in a cabin on the Continental Divide.
- GenresFiction
415 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
124 people want to read
About the author
Eric Paul Shaffer
17 books43 followersEric Paul Shaffer is author of nine volumes of poetry. Most recent are Free Speech, published April 1, 2025, and Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems, published on Hallowe'en in 2023. Even Further West was published in 2018 by Unsolicited Press, and A Million-Dollar Bill was published by Grayson Books in 2016 and re-published by Coyote Arts in January 2024. Other volumes include Lāhaina Noon: Nā Mele O Maui; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; Portable Planet; RattleSnake Rider; and Kindling: Poems from Two Poets (with James Taylor III).
Shaffer's next book of poetry Second Nature is a single poetry volume of fifty-seven poems previously published individually in reviews of the past decades. The book will be published in 2026.
Nearly seven hundred individual poems appear in venues throughout the world, including Slate, North American Review, The Sun Magazine, RATTLE, Ploughshares, and Threepenny Review; Ireland's Poetry Ireland Review and Southword Journal; Australia’s Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Island, and Quadrant Magazine,; Canada’s Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and PRISM International; New Zealand’s Takahé and Poetry NZ; England’s The Stand Magazine, and Magma; and in the anthologies 100 Poets Against the War (Salt 2003); The EcoPoetry Anthology (Trinity UP 2013); and Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai‘i (And Some Stories) (Tinfish 2013).
His first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published by Leaping Dog Press in 2009, and two chapbooks of fiction selected from the novel have also been published: The Felony Stick and You Are Here.
Shaffer has completed and will soon circulate for publication a second novel Six Ways Home, the story of fifteen-year-old Ray who works at a Michigan Christmas tree farm and lives with his mother, brother, and sister, who have been recently abandoned by the father.
In 2002, Shaffer won the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, an endowed literary prize awarded annually to an established local writer in Hawai‘i. In 2006, he received a fellowship to the Fishtrap Summer Writers Workshop and Retreat; won the Rupert Hughes Writing Award for an excerpt of his novel-in-progress Six Ways Home; and received the "Award of Excellence" in the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards for Lāhaina Noon from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. In 2019, Even Further West also received "Honorable Mention" in the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards.
Shaffer’s poem "Officer, I Saw the Whole Thing," from Lāhaina Noon, received a "Special Mention" in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXI. In 2009, for his poem "The Whistle," he won the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry from Hawai‘i Pacific University; the poem is included in A Million-Dollar Bill. In 2010, his poem "A Boat of Bones" received first place in the Lorin Tar Gill Writing Competition sponsored by the National League of American PEN Women; this poem is included in Even Further West and in Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems.
Long ago, he was a co-editor of Conceptions Southwest and a book reviewer and poetry co-editor for Stick: Contemporary Poetry and Timeless Cuisine. More recently, he has reviewed for Fish Drum, Mad Blood, Maui Time Weekly, Chiron Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. He was also a contributing editor for The 365 Project.
Shaffer was raised, educated, and annealed in Maryland, Michigan, Indiana, New Mexico, California, and all parts Pacific, including Okinawa, Maui, and Oʻahu.
Shaffer's next book of poetry Second Nature is a single poetry volume of fifty-seven poems previously published individually in reviews of the past decades. The book will be published in 2026.
Nearly seven hundred individual poems appear in venues throughout the world, including Slate, North American Review, The Sun Magazine, RATTLE, Ploughshares, and Threepenny Review; Ireland's Poetry Ireland Review and Southword Journal; Australia’s Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Island, and Quadrant Magazine,; Canada’s Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and PRISM International; New Zealand’s Takahé and Poetry NZ; England’s The Stand Magazine, and Magma; and in the anthologies 100 Poets Against the War (Salt 2003); The EcoPoetry Anthology (Trinity UP 2013); and Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai‘i (And Some Stories) (Tinfish 2013).
His first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published by Leaping Dog Press in 2009, and two chapbooks of fiction selected from the novel have also been published: The Felony Stick and You Are Here.
Shaffer has completed and will soon circulate for publication a second novel Six Ways Home, the story of fifteen-year-old Ray who works at a Michigan Christmas tree farm and lives with his mother, brother, and sister, who have been recently abandoned by the father.
In 2002, Shaffer won the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, an endowed literary prize awarded annually to an established local writer in Hawai‘i. In 2006, he received a fellowship to the Fishtrap Summer Writers Workshop and Retreat; won the Rupert Hughes Writing Award for an excerpt of his novel-in-progress Six Ways Home; and received the "Award of Excellence" in the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards for Lāhaina Noon from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. In 2019, Even Further West also received "Honorable Mention" in the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards.
Shaffer’s poem "Officer, I Saw the Whole Thing," from Lāhaina Noon, received a "Special Mention" in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXI. In 2009, for his poem "The Whistle," he won the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry from Hawai‘i Pacific University; the poem is included in A Million-Dollar Bill. In 2010, his poem "A Boat of Bones" received first place in the Lorin Tar Gill Writing Competition sponsored by the National League of American PEN Women; this poem is included in Even Further West and in Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems.
Long ago, he was a co-editor of Conceptions Southwest and a book reviewer and poetry co-editor for Stick: Contemporary Poetry and Timeless Cuisine. More recently, he has reviewed for Fish Drum, Mad Blood, Maui Time Weekly, Chiron Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. He was also a contributing editor for The 365 Project.
Shaffer was raised, educated, and annealed in Maryland, Michigan, Indiana, New Mexico, California, and all parts Pacific, including Okinawa, Maui, and Oʻahu.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 16, 2020
READ IT! WROTE IT! LOVE IT! You will, too. If you are looking for 54 cubic inches of raw fiction power, hop on, and may your travels through the Cenozoic Era be entrancing, enriching, and rewarding.
December 2, 2009
This was a really different type of book for me: three different main story lines are running & pop up at random in very short & very entertaining chapters. The themes are: the main character & his close friend, K.C.,his on & off girlfriend, also named K.C. & his wonderful dog, Rufus, whom I liked a lot. I want a dog like that who will wait at the street corner until I say it's ok to cross! Another part of this carzy book is technical info. about writing a book about the end of the world, that part I didn't really get. And another theme is lovely & it's quite a few great & funny Coyote tales. That last part was really good. Shaffer can really write fiction. The different themes are all indexed so the reader can read just one storyline if he wants. I plan to go back & reread just the end of the world part to better understand the point of it. This was a fun read & I was always happy to get back to it. Good lucK Eric, I hope it does wonderfully!!
December 15, 2009
Burn & Learn is--I promise--unlike any book you've read before. Calling itself a "biomorphic bookmovie" and "unabridged encyclopedia of the Century of Technological Disaster", it's a self-conscious but never pompous, irreverent yet profound, 415 pages of observations, fables, lists, koans, flash fiction, prose poetry, ads, and more. Shaffer challenges not only your expectations of what a book is, but the very way you read. The chapters are short and addictive, related by recurring themes and unfettered by chronology. Check out some of the chapter titles: "The Most Sarcastic Woman in the World", "Serendipity, Synchronicity, Stupidity, Simplicity", "Yorick's Vanilla Grin", "My Uncle Killed John Wayne First" and "Anonymous Beer". As you browse and read the chapters in whatever order you want, finding out what's on the 20th Century Missing List and how to celebrate International Time Travel Day with Reckless and his pals, you'll find yourself having more fun than you thought a book could provide.
August 7, 2011
Crazy-good--I feel like a buddhist novice on the trail of enlightenment. Engaging, funny and sometimes puzzling, this book will do what it promises--Burn and Learn.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews