By Melissa Arnold
Almost four years ago, Michael Medico of Northport made his first foray into fiction writing with “The Sainted,” a spiritual thriller released in 2015. Back then, he talked with us about spending more than 40 years in marketing and advertising before his retirement.
It seems appropriate, then, that Medico’s latest book is a satirical take on today’s media and politics. The book, “Absolutely Positively Real Fake News: A Jaunty Romp Through the Deep State, Media Industrial Complex and the Progressive Mind,” is a series of fictitious news articles based on real people or events, with an outlandish twist.
The idea came about while Medico was dealing with writer’s block over the third book in “The Sainted” trilogy. He decided to set it aside for a while and experiment with something fresh and fun.
“I’ve always been a political junkie, and at some level consider myself a humorist,” said Medico in a recent interview. “I thought I would use my humorous take on things to write about the absurdities that have happened in recent times, and the way that they’re portrayed and talked about on TV, in the news, and especially online.”
Taking on the pseudonym Sir Telsunn Margraves, Medico weaves stories that focus on contemporary issues in politics, pop culture, sports and more.
Take, for example, comedian and political commentator Samantha Bee, who hosts the late night news satire show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” on TBS. What would it be like if she interviewed the Clintons? Medico imagines the conversation in the book, including a moment when Hillary admits she sews her own signature pantsuits.
“With every piece of fake news we see, there is always some element of truth present,” Medico said. “That’s the most important element to these stories, and it’s what people are going to connect with and respond to.”
Readers who are willing to do a little of their own digging might be surprised to discover some of the zaniest details in the book are actually true. Did you know that former FBI director James Comey was briefly considered a sex symbol on Twitter? And did you hear that Comey once hid behind some curtains to avoid an awkward run-in with President Donald Trump? While they may sound unbelievable, these facts are the seeds of truth in one of Medico’s stories.
“I want people to think deeply about the news they’re consuming, I want them to ask questions, but just as importantly I want to make them laugh,” Medico said. “We have to be able to poke fun at things and find the humor in what’s going on.”
For those who can’t get enough of the fun, Sir Telsunn runs his own fake news blog, complete with rousing discussion in the comments section, at www.realfakenewsthebook.com.
“Absolutely Positively Real Fake News: A Jaunty Romp Through the Deep State, Media Industrial Complex and the Progressive Mind” is available at Book Revue, 313 New York Ave., Huntington, and through major online retailers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Medico will appear at Book Revue on April 4 at 7 p.m. for a reading from the book, Q&A session and meet and greet. For more information, call 631-271-1442. RSVPs are requested. Send an email to [email protected].
Lulu’s world is populated with a winning variety of characters including the stage manager, the child wrangler, the dance captain, backstage staff, actors and, of course, the show’s star, the regal-yet-kind Stella James. “What’s important is to remember that it takes a team, a village, a family to put on a Broadway show and take care of the theatre.” Here is the bustle of theater life, the demands of rehearsals and the excitement of performance. And we are appropriately reminded that it is not just the performers but everyone from box office to backstage who make the magic.
Recommended for middle school readers, 
Freud introduces the source of the tensions between creativity and destructiveness. He assigns it to the id/superego conflict. I would use instead our capacity for love, empathy and sympathy versus our capacity for hate, bigotry and violence. Freud calls the process sublimation. He began writing this book in 1929 and published it two years later. He predicted that the rise of Nazism was imminent and would lead to massive death because humanity does not know how to sublimate its discontents into the path of the joys of civilization — its arts, humanity, play and immense scholarship. 
This is my favorite novel. It is the story of a young French boy raised by a devout Catholic family who thinks he will become a priest. He discovers instead that the more he learns the more doubts arise not only about his calling but his faith. He teaches biology and is fired for teaching evolution. His wife and daughter separate from him. He throws himself into the Freethinkers movement in France and gets involved in the Dreyfus case. He discovers that reason alone cannot sustain his life but returning to his faith is equally inadequate. 
Montaigne’s essays describe his life and the times in which he lived in the context of a rich appreciation of classical literature. He tries to make sense of a world that is pretentious, at war with itself and filled with irony, contradictions and lessons we can extract from the past. Read a 20th-century translation of these essays rather than the 16th-century English translation. Start with his essay on friendship and his essay: “How by various means we all end at the same place.”
I loved reading Pepys’s diaries and was thrilled that he was an eyewitness to the bubonic plague that swept through England in 1665 and the London fire that destroyed most of the city in 1666. Pepys is an imperfect person — not immune to accepting sacks of gold for awarding contracts for the British Navy, flirting with other women but loving his wife and learning to avoid threats to his career from others drawn to the politics of the time.
Darwin is an excellent observer and narrator. He wrote this book as an abstract of a huge multivolume plan for presenting his theory of evolution of species by natural selection. He is careful to distinguish evidence from theory and uses the facts to derive his interpretations of how evolution works. Darwin did not start with a theory and then seek facts to support it. He went with no idea about evolution and instead allowed the hundreds of observations and findings guide him to the only interpretation that made sense of the relations he found whether it was the work of hobbyists and breeders creating new varieties of plants and animals, the geographic distribution of plants and animals he encountered in his trip around the world, or the fossils he encountered. 
This story is about a 10-year-old girl who loses her father to a heart attack. She learns that at night, she can travel to the afterlife, so she decides to try to bring him back. But traveling to the afterlife can be very scary and even dangerous. Along the way, she encounters people in the afterlife from a variety of different backgrounds and points in history that support her. I don’t have a dramatic personal story that inspired the book. If you look at a lot of children’s literature, the main character is either alone or has lost one parent, and that sets them off on an adventure.
Taking a famous story and its characters and presenting them from a different perspective is a delicate and difficult task. More often than not, these attempts miss the mark. The exceptions (Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked,” Tom Mula’s “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol”) are few. We can joyously welcome to this short list John Leonard Pielmeier’s remarkably entertaining “Hook’s Tale: Being the Account of an Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written by Himself.”
Why did you choose to write a story from the point of view of a baby ?
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