L.S. Paragone
ALLi Author Member
Location: United States of America
Genres: History, Philosophy, Contemporary Fiction, Dystopian, Historical Fiction, Thriller, Political / Social Commentary Poetry
L. S. Paragone is the author of an ambitious body of literary fiction that explores the invisible systems shaping modern life. His novels examine how institutions are created, sustained, and transformed through ordinary human behavior, revealing the quiet forces that influence families, communities, governments, and history. His work spans contemporary literary fiction, political fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction, and speculative fiction. Whether set in ancient civilizations or modern bureaucracies, each novel asks enduring questions about power, responsibility, memory, and the individual’s place within larger social structures. L. S. Paragone is not an escapist-fiction writer; his novels are literary systems fiction, philosophical institutional fiction, and, at the corpus level, a literature of human complicity and stabilization. Rather than asking readers to escape ordinary reality, Paragone asks them to examine it more closely: how decisions become habits, habits become procedures, procedures become institutions, and institutions eventually appear independent of the people who created them. His central proposition is that “there is no system outside us” because the true character of the corpus is humanity itself, distributed across generations, records, incentives, compromises, silences, and acts of recognition. The bureaucracy, government, market, family, tribe, archive, or algorithm is therefore rarely the ultimate antagonist; each is an accumulated expression of human behavior. Paragone’s fiction does not simply ask, What did the system do to us? It asks the more disturbing question: What did we do repeatedly enough to call it the system, and now that we recognize ourselves in it, are we willing to face the consequences?
L.S. Paragone's books
Genres: Historical Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
1000 years before Robin Hood became a legend, another man gave everything he had to those who had nothing. Cast out by his own tribe yet unwilling to abandon his honor, Urwa ibn al-Ward chooses an extraordinary path. He leads a band of outcasts across the deserts of Arabia, not to enrich themselves, but to feed the hungry, protect the vulnerable, and restore dignity to those society has forgotten. Every raid carries a cost. Every act of generosity invites new enemies. Every victory brings him closer to the sacrifice that will define his legacy. Inspired by the life of one of the greatest figures of pre-Islamic Arabia, Urwa is an epic historical novel of courage, compassion, loyalty, and love. Beneath the adventure lies the deeply human story of a father, a husband, a poet, and a leader whose greatest battles are fought not for glory, but for people who can...
Genres: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Hashim: The Man Before the Dynasty Before history called him Hashim, he was Amr. Born into one of Mecca’s great houses, Amr ibn Abd Manaf inherits privilege, obligation, and a rivalry that begins almost with his first breath. Around him stands a city with little agriculture of its own, dependent upon roads that can close, wells controlled by others, agreements that can fail, and caravans carrying the difference between abundance and hunger. Amr begins to understand that power does not always come from conquest. Sometimes it begins with something far less dramatic: a road made dependable, a promise honored twice, bread reaching a hungry household, or strangers discovering that cooperation is more profitable than fear. His world expands from Mecca to Yemen and Gaza, through tribal territories, markets, households, marriages, rivalries, and negotiations. What later generations will remember as ilaf emerges here at human scale, before it becomes history, while...
Genres: Speculative Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
The Throne of Fig & Olive I–V A Five-Volume Work of Political Surrealism by L. S. Paragone The Throne of Fig & Olive is a five-volume work of political surrealism, system fiction, and institutional realism that follows the evolution of power across generations and, ultimately, across thousands of years of human civilization. Set primarily within an imagined Palestine, the series occupies a world that is recognizable yet deliberately displaced from ordinary political reality. Courts, palaces, archives, ministries, records, media systems, rituals, technology, and inherited authority behave according to familiar institutional logic, yet their accumulation creates something stranger: a political world in which procedure can feel more powerful than personality, records can acquire the weight of memory, and institutions can seem almost alive. That is the surrealism of the series. It does not depend on fantasy or the supernatural. Instead, Paragone creates political surrealism through institutional exaggeration without abandoning institutional plausibility....
Genres: Literary Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
The Maxine Cycle: Volumes I–VI The Maxine Cycle is the bedrock of the L. S. Paragone corpus, the foundational literary-philosophical series from which Paragone’s larger examination of institutions, power, legitimacy, and human behavior ultimately grows. Across six volumes, the series reaches deep into the earliest formations of organized civilization, exploring the long human passage from kinship and custom toward law, administration, hierarchy, record, authority, and eventually the durable structures we recognize as systems. Its world is ancient, but its central question is unmistakably modern: How does something created by human beings acquire enough permanence that later generations begin to experience it as something outside themselves? Beginning in the civilizations of the ancient world, The Maxine Cycle follows the incremental construction of order. A name is recorded. A boundary is recognized. A rule becomes repeatable. A judgment becomes precedent. Grain becomes inventory. Memory becomes inscription. Authority becomes office. What begins as...
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Dance of the Little Swanks: The System Behind the Curtain Seventeen-year-old Ashley Hale has grown up around polished adults who know how to make everything sound reasonable. Contracts are relationships. Influence is community. Problems are personnel matters. And questions are welcomed, as long as they are the right questions. Then Ashley finds the paperwork. What begins with strange grant codes and procurement records leads her into the hidden machinery of her affluent school district, where favors travel through dinners, friendships, consultants, boardrooms, and carefully chosen words. With her sharp-tongued friend Maya beside her and Bob, an older mentor who teaches her the difference between suspicion and proof, Ashley begins following the record. But Ashley is still seventeen. She makes assumptions. She gets angry. She wants the truth to be cleaner than it is. And as her investigation reaches deeper into the district, it also reaches into her own family. Soon...
Genres: Speculative Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 18+
Magellan Island (Book I) On a secluded private island where influence is cultivated more carefully than power itself, intelligence analyst Kit Nassar arrives expecting to map networks of global influence. Instead, he uncovers something far more unsettling: an institution that rarely censors information because it has learned a far more effective technique—it quietly rearranges reality until truth loses its ability to matter. As investors, government officials, strategists, and media architects converge within the island's carefully designed ecosystem, Kit discovers that every report, conversation, memory, and official record is part of a larger architecture built to shape perception rather than events. Resistance is met not with violence, but with procedural delay, administrative silence, and the gradual erosion of certainty. As alliances fracture and identities begin to blur, Kit must decide whether truth can survive inside a system that no longer depends on lies. Magellan Island is a sophisticated political thriller exploring...
Genres: Commercial Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thriller
Vector of Error A Two-Book Series Genre: Financial Thriller • Political Thriller • Systems Thriller • Commercial Fiction Markets are built on numbers. Institutions are built on language. Confidence is built on belief. In Vector of Error, L. S. Paragone presents a two-book thriller that follows journalist Leona Vance as she uncovers evidence that the world's financial architecture is changing in ways almost no one recognizes. What begins as a handful of routine documents, revised contracts, and technical anomalies gradually reveals a deeper pattern—one that spreads not through dramatic conspiracies, but through ordinary administrative decisions, procedural language, and institutional adaptation. Book I – Vector of Error When a series of subtle irregularities appears across international financial systems, investigative journalist Leona Vance begins asking questions that few others believe are worth asking. As traders, economists, government officials, and ordinary families encounter the quiet consequences of changing rules, she discovers that the...
Genres: Commercial Fiction, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 18+
What Happened Between A routine emergency call is quietly reclassified. The patient survives the paperwork. The record survives the patient. Elias Rho is a senior analyst inside CIVIS GRID, a vast administrative network that transforms human emergencies into categories, thresholds, and response protocols. When a seemingly minor revision to Protocol 7.3 changes how urgent cases are classified, the new policy appears efficient, rational, and fully defensible. Then one case refuses to disappear. As Elias traces the minutes between a real emergency and the official record that describes it, he discovers that institutions rarely fail through a single catastrophic decision. They change through small approvals, careful language, revised definitions, and ordinary people convinced they are improving the system. With every document he opens, the distance between what happened and what is recorded grows harder to ignore. What Happened Between is a psychological literary thriller about bureaucracy, accountability, memory, and the quiet...
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, General Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 18+
Multipolar in Labor is a five-book political-philosophical fiction series that explores one of the defining transformations of the twenty-first century: the transition from a world shaped by a single dominant order to one governed by competing centers of power, fractured institutions, and increasingly procedural systems of authority. Across the series, L. S. Paragone follows ordinary people whose lives are altered not by dramatic revolutions, but by delayed approvals, shifting standards, administrative decisions, and the quiet expansion of institutional power. Beginning with Book I: The Interregnum and the Record, the series examines the uncertainty of a world between orders, where governments, markets, and citizens struggle to navigate an unstable transition. Book II asks a deeper civic question: who is the real friend and who is the real enemy when institutions themselves can shape the answer? Book III: Operational Definition of Multipolarity moves beyond geopolitics to reveal multipolarity as a structural condition...
Genres: Historical Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Ida Howard Series I-V Some crimes end with a verdict. Others begin with a record. When investigative journalist and human-rights documentation specialist Ida Howard encounters a death that powerful institutions are eager to explain away, she refuses to accept the official version. As witnesses grow silent, records disappear, and carefully chosen words begin to replace uncomfortable truths, Ida discovers that the greatest battle is often not over what happened—but over who controls how it will be remembered. Set in a richly realized America of the 1990s, Ida is a gripping blend of investigative suspense, social realism, and institutional drama. Rather than chasing villains through action alone, Ida follows paper trails, forgotten ledgers, reluctant witnesses, and the quiet courage of ordinary people determined to keep history from being erased. Ida is the first novel in L. S. Paragone's five-book Ida series. Each installment explores a different investigation, institution, and human tragedy...
Genres: Dystopian, Speculative Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
System Vortex In a world where no one says no—but everything still arrives too late—System Vortex follows Elin Marr, a mother racing to save her daughter while confronting a system that delays without denying, classifies without announcing, and quietly transforms human lives into administrative records. Every appeal is acknowledged. Every request remains active. Yet each unseen recalculation moves help just a little farther away. Blending intimate human drama with unsettling institutional realism, System Vortex explores a world where delays become decisions, classifications become destiny, and the greatest danger is not that the system fails—but that it functions exactly as designed. As every process continues without error, the question becomes unavoidable: what happens when people are no longer treated as lives to be saved, but as cases to be processed? A haunting work of speculative fiction that examines bureaucracy, technology, healthcare, and the quiet cost of procedural power, System Vortex asks...
Genres: Literary Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
The Ridge Line Long before laws, governments, or civilizations, survival depended on one fragile truth: a group remained strong only as long as its members chose one another. An aging troop leader struggles to hold his community together as a changing landscape places increasing pressure on every individual. Hunger, fear, exhaustion, and self-preservation slowly replace instinctive cooperation with private calculation. No single act destroys the troop. Instead, countless ordinary choices—each understandable on its own—gradually reshape the bonds that once made survival possible. Told entirely through the lives of a primate troop, The Ridge Line is both an intimate story of endurance and a profound meditation on the origins of human society. Without speeches or ideology, L. S. Paragone traces how leadership, loyalty, family, territory, responsibility, and power emerge from everyday behavior long before they become institutions. The novel follows bodies rather than abstractions, allowing meaning to arise from movement, touch,...
Genres: Commercial Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
The Nominalists What happens when the name becomes more important than the person? A company can assign a value to a product. A government can classify a citizen. A market can price a risk. Over time, these ordinary acts begin to reshape reality itself. In a world governed by algorithms, financial models, regulatory language, and institutional definitions, a small group of professionals begins to notice an unsettling pattern. Decisions that appear objective are quietly changing the meaning of justice, responsibility, and even identity. Human beings are no longer understood first as individuals, but as categories, scores, market segments, liabilities, and statistical probabilities. As economists, executives, regulators, and analysts struggle to defend the systems they helped build, they discover that the greatest transformation did not occur in technology or finance. It occurred in language. Once a new name is accepted, reality slowly reorganizes itself around it. The Nominalists is an intellectual...
Genres: Literary Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Power rarely disappears. It changes hands. The question is who inherits its secrets. When billionaire industrialist Marcus Vale dies, his son Adrian expects to inherit one of the nation's most influential private empires. Instead, he inherits a question that has been buried for more than twenty years. His sister Elena, confined to the secluded Westbridge Institution as a young woman, has never disappeared from the family fortune. She has remained an equal heir. Hidden. Managed. Protected by a network of lawyers, physicians, trustees, and financial mechanisms designed to transform confinement into administrative routine. As forgotten ledgers, concealed trust records, secret compartments, forensic evidence, and long-suppressed witnesses begin to emerge, Adrian discovers that his father's greatest legacy was never wealth. It was an institutional architecture built to preserve power by controlling truth. Every document raises a larger question. Every explanation exposes another layer of concealment. The inheritance is no longer financial....
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
The Moral Exception Paul Mercer has spent his life believing that integrity is measured by the choices people make when no one is watching. It is a principle that has guided his career, his marriage, and the quiet routines of a life built on responsibility rather than ambition. Then a single decision, made for reasons that seem reasonable at the time, begins to alter everything. As professional expectations collide with personal loyalties, Paul and his wife, Amy, discover that moral compromise rarely arrives as a dramatic betrayal. It appears in ordinary conversations, practical justifications, and small exceptions that gradually become impossible to distinguish from the rules themselves. Each accommodation promises stability. Each leaves something behind that cannot easily be recovered. Moving between the pressures of professional life and the fragile intimacy of home, The Moral Exception is a psychological literary novel about conscience, marriage, responsibility, and the quiet ways decent...
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
The Devouring of Faith Dr. Faith Brannon has spent her career believing that complex systems can be made more humane through reason, discipline, and careful judgment. As one of the architects of ethical governance inside a global healthcare institution, she has devoted her life to ensuring that rules protect people rather than harm them. Then one ordinary case begins to unravel that belief. A bureaucratic inconsistency delays treatment for a young woman. Policies that once seemed prudent begin producing consequences no one intended but everyone accepts. As Faith follows the chain of decisions, she discovers that institutions rarely consume lives through malice alone. They do so through ordinary people, careful language, shared responsibility, and the quiet transfer of moral judgment from individuals to systems. Forced to confront both the machinery around her and the part she played in building it, Faith must decide whether truth can survive inside structures designed...
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Terms of Residence Daniel Price arrives at Aurelia Strand expecting a place to live. Instead, he enters a world where belonging is no longer measured by memory, commitment, or character, but by rules. At first, the rules appear ordinary. Forms are completed. Requests are reviewed. Small decisions are explained with polite professionalism. Yet each answer quietly shifts the meaning of residence itself. What begins as a temporary arrangement slowly becomes an invisible system in which eligibility precedes identity, and recognition depends less on who a person is than on how completely they fit the institution's language. As Daniel struggles to preserve a sense of permanence, those around him confront the same quiet machinery from different directions. Employees learn to administer decisions they no longer fully understand. Residents begin adapting to expectations they never agreed to. Everyday conversations about neighbors, paperwork, maintenance, and home gradually become questions about legitimacy, memory, and...
Genres: Commercial Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Revenue Verification Colleen O'James has spent years building a company on discipline, precision, and measurable results. Every decision is supported by data. Every risk is calculated. Every success has been earned. Then an anonymous lender offers her business a twenty-million-dollar commercial line of credit. The opportunity appears extraordinary. The institution refuses to identify itself. Its representatives possess information they should not have. Their questions reach beyond financial statements into suppliers, employees, private conversations, and family routines. What begins as a promising business proposal slowly becomes an examination of everything her company and her life depend upon. As inventory freezes, relationships strain, and the pressure follows her from the boardroom to her own kitchen table, Colleen discovers that some systems do not impose themselves through force. They advance through procedure, patience, and the quiet expectation of compliance. Moving between corporate offices, suburban neighborhoods, family dinners, and ordinary moments that gradually become...
Genres: Philosophy, Experimental Fiction, Literary Fiction
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
What if civilization never collapsed? What if it simply became too efficient to remember why it existed? Life in Merritt looks reassuringly ordinary. Families gather for breakfast. Children sing in school chorus. Neighbors share meals, restore classic cars, and shovel snow after winter storms. The routines of everyday America continue, even as small administrative changes quietly reshape the world around them. Ethan Shaw is a husband, father, and systems analyst who believes that keeping a promise to his daughter matters more than any policy or procedure. But when institutions begin making decisions before people do, he discovers that the greatest threats to freedom rarely arrive through force. They arrive through convenience, optimization, and the gradual surrender of human judgment. As the boundaries between assistance and authority begin to disappear, Ethan must decide what is worth preserving in a society that no longer remembers the difference between serving people and managing...
Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Imperium Occultum Behind every war is a headline. Behind every headline is a decision. Behind every decision is someone who believes they are acting reasonably. When a humanitarian convoy is trapped on a desert road and a routine delay ends in catastrophe, the official explanation is swift, polished, and reassuring. The world moves on. Journalist Gabriel Soren does not. Following a fragment of forgotten footage, a nearly invisible insignia, and a chain of decisions that no one seems willing to own, Gabriel uncovers a hidden architecture of influence stretching across governments, private contractors, intelligence networks, financial institutions, energy markets, and international policy circles. No single conspiracy controls the world. The truth is more unsettling. Thousands of ordinary decisions, each defensible on its own, combine to produce extraordinary consequences that no individual can fully claim and no institution can honestly explain. As the investigation spreads across continents, Gabriel discovers that power...
Genres: Dystopian, Speculative Fiction, Thriller
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
A system can record a life without ever understanding it. Elias Rook has spent years moving through a world of offices, archives, classifications, and procedures. The system around him processes everything placed before it. It assigns categories, preserves records, and continues with quiet confidence. Yet Elias begins to notice a persistent misalignment between what the system recognizes and what people actually live. Beyond the files are farms, hospitals, family tables, neglected roads, old obligations, and memories that resist orderly description. As Elias moves between institutional routines and the rural world that formed him, he confronts the limits of documentation and the enduring instincts that remain beneath civilization’s carefully maintained structures. Homo Rusticus is a literary and philosophical novel about memory, belonging, bureaucracy, and the persistence of ordinary human life. It asks what survives when experience is reduced to information, and whether a person can remain fully human inside a structure...
Genres: Historical Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
An empire expected her to surrender. History remembers that she refused. When betrayal shatters the throne of Palmyra, Queen Zenobia must choose between survival and sovereignty. With Rome closing in and powerful rivals surrounding her, she transforms a desert kingdom into one of the ancient world's most formidable powers, challenging the greatest empire of her age. Inspired by the remarkable life of one of history's most celebrated queens, Zenobia is a sweeping historical novel of courage, ambition, sacrifice, and the burdens of leadership. Beyond the battles and politics lies the story of a woman forced to balance the demands of an empire with the private cost of power, motherhood, friendship, and love. Richly researched and vividly imagined, Zenobia brings the ancient world to life through unforgettable characters, breathtaking settings, and timeless human conflicts. It is a story of resilience in the face of overwhelming odds and of a queen whose...
Genres: Historical Fiction, Suspense
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
Long before kingdoms rose and empires marched across Arabia, one woman saw what no one else could. Blessed, and burdened, with extraordinary vision, Yamāmah witnesses danger long before it reaches her people. Yet the greatest challenge of her life is not seeing the future. It is persuading others to believe what they cannot see. Set in pre-Islamic Arabia and inspired by one of the region's most enduring legends, Yamāmah reimagines the life of the woman remembered as Zarqāʾ al-Yamāmah through a richly human and emotionally compelling story. Amid tribal rivalries, shifting loyalties, love, loss, and the relentless struggle for survival, her remarkable gift becomes both a blessing and a curse. More than a historical novel, Yamāmah is a timeless exploration of leadership, trust, courage, and the price paid by those who recognize the truth before everyone else. The first novel in the Arab Legends series, Yamāmah brings one of history's...
Genres: Advice & How To, Philosophy, Writing & Publishing
Formats: E-Book
Age Groups: 16-18, 18+
How to Read Like Paragone How do you read a novel that refuses to behave like other novels? L. S. Paragone's fiction has drawn attention for its unusual architecture, philosophical depth, and quiet confidence. Rather than relying on conventional heroes and villains, dramatic twists, or tidy resolutions, his novels reveal how ordinary human behavior becomes institutions, traditions, and systems that ultimately shape civilizations. How to Read Like Paragone is an accessible guide to the ideas, themes, and narrative techniques that define the Paragone Corpus. It introduces readers to the philosophical foundations behind the novels, explains their interconnected architecture, and explores why recurring patterns of human behavior matter more than isolated events. Drawing from works that span historical fiction, literary fiction, political fiction, speculative fiction, and institutional drama, this book shows how Paragone builds stories where every conversation, decision, and compromise contributes to a larger design. Readers will discover the recurring...