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? https://www.lsparagone.com/
L.S. Paragone's books
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...