Vancouver, British Columbia Oct 22, 2026 (Issuewire.com) - Presented as a sequence of standalone aphorisms on money, friendship, vanity, and self-deception, the collection distills observations that might otherwise require a chapter into a single sentence apiece, offering a concise examination of honesty and human nature in an age of curated image and spin.

One of the collection's defining qualities is its density. Savage works in a tradition that runs back through La Rochefoucauld and Twain--the compressed, standalone observation that has to earn its keep in a single sentence, with no plot or paragraph to fall back on--and sustains that form across two hundred lines without losing its thematic range. Lines move quickly between subject and tone: "The easiest person to lie to is yourself" sits a few pages from "a fake fireplace is a prostitute of nature," and the abrupt shifts are part of the collection's design. Money, friendship, self-deception, fame, and vanity recur from multiple angles, so that, taken together, those recurring convictions--that flattery is cheap, honesty is rarer than people claim, and much of self-improvement is theater--form something closer to a worldview than a list.

What keeps the collection from reading as merely cynical is its willingness to turn the criticism back on the narrator as well. Lines like "my inner voice has never once let me win an argument" and "the worst and most lasting pain is self-inflicted" sit alongside the book's sharper observations about vanity and self-deception, creating a perspective that does not exempt the writer from the subjects he examines. Individual lines stand on their own, but read together, Read Between the Lines builds a case, one sentence at a time, about the gap between what people say and what they mean.

Benton Savage writes fiction, memoir, and poetry grounded in close, often unflattering observation of himself as much as anyone else. He is the author of the memoir Wrong Side Out: Madness Misdiagnosed, which chronicles his years navigating undiagnosed bipolar disorder and reached #1 in Psychology for new books on Amazon in January 2026; the novels Fishing with Bananas and Free and Satisfied; and The Stoic Alcoholic: It's Not Only About Counting Days, a memoir of his three decades with addiction. His poetry collection, Fortune Cookies: 100 Sayings to Help You Navigate Life's Challenges, reached #1 on Amazon's new poetry. With Read Between the Lines, Savage applies that perspective to a more concise and skeptical examination of human behavior.

Read Between the Lines is available through Amazon and other major online bookstores. For more information, visit www.bentonsavage.com.

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