Novelist · Screenwriter

I write about people caught within systems larger than themselves—and the small decisions that quietly change everything.

Larry Rubenstein writes across autobiography, literary fantasy, literary noir, and architecture—work grounded in human experience and attentive to the moment an ordinary life changes course.

Explore the works

Selected works

Five books. Five distinct worlds.

Autobiographical novel · Based on true events

A Coward’s Hero

A Coward’s Hero is an autobiographical literary war narrative tracing an eighteen-year-old Marine’s 1967–68 tour in Vietnam—from Chu Lai to the Tet Offensive in Da Nang—where the mythology of heroism gives way to the cold logic of survival.

Initially a flamethrower operator, he is reassigned to a battalion operations bunker near Da Nang. From this position—both participant and observer—he witnesses the war’s cynical machinery: maps are altered, patrols are staged for appearances, and success is reduced to empty metrics. After surviving a night abandoned in hostile jungle during Operation Pitt, he increasingly understands that chance governs life more often than courage.

Running through it all is the Marines’ dark, irreverent humor—the jokes, barracks absurdities, and small acts of defiance that allow frightened young men to remain human inside a system indifferent to them.

Returning home physically intact but psychologically altered, he struggles with an enduring hypervigilance. Rejecting traditional tales of valor, A Coward’s Hero examines the uneasy, uncelebrated burden of having simply survived.

Based on Larry Rubenstein’s service with the 2/7 Marines in I Corps and told with unsparing honesty.

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Literary noir · Crime drama

The Five-Dollar Variable

The Five-Dollar Variable is a literary noir about the dangerous distance between seeing the truth and remaining innocent of what happens to it. A five-dollar flat leaves endurance cyclist Lorenzo Thorne beside the body of a young woman on a remote Baja beach. The man already at the scene tells him to ride away. The flat is chance; staying is choice.

That decision draws him into a coastal world where family loyalty, criminal power, and respectable institutions protect one another without needing to conspire. Beside Arturo Valladares, a compromised federal investigator who understands what seeing costs, Lorenzo searches for a clean line between cause, guilt, and responsibility—and discovers there may be none. Here, truth is not simply buried. It is divided into versions, each plausible enough for someone to survive believing.

Set among fogbound beaches, working docks, and the private rooms of Baja’s elite, the novel asks what remains of justice when fear, mercy, love, and self-preservation become part of the same arrangement. As Lorenzo moves closer to understanding Alessandra’s death, he confronts the uneasy divide between discovering the truth and achieving justice.

A completed novel adapted as a six-part television limited series.

Adult literary fantasy

The Forest That Screamed

At its heart, The Forest That Screamed is a fable about the difference between possessing the world and listening to it. In the remote village of Yapalap, an old woodworker teaches his son that true craft begins with attention: the grain remembers what it was, and the perfect hole reveals not magic, but what is already true.

When a frightened king tries to turn that gift into a weapon, he threatens an ancient covenant between the people and the land. As the land’s buried grief awakens in the form of a primordial serpent, artisans—not warriors—must confront a kingdom that knows how to command, consume, and destroy, but has forgotten how to see. What follows is a literary fantasy about craft, corruption, memory, and renewal—and the possibility that what power breaks, patient hands and devotion can begin to make whole again.

The novel grew from Larry Rubenstein’s friendship with fine woodworker Roger Deatherage, whose devotion to craft—listening to the grain and shaping only what the wood allows—deeply influenced his architecture, his writing, and his approach to life.

Personal essays · Stories

Garbage Only, No Trash

These stories were never meant to become a book. They began as scraps—notes scribbled on receipts, half-finished thoughts, and memories that refused to stay buried.

Moving between comic mishap and loss, Larry Rubenstein looks back at family, friendship, years of travel, poor decisions, and the strangers who briefly altered the course of his life. Funny, unsparing, and deeply personal, Garbage Only, No Trash gathers the beautiful wreckage of an ordinary life—and finds that very little of it was trash.

First published in 2017. A revised edition is in preparation.

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Autobiographical novel · Architecture

Elegant Simplicity

In late-1970s Houston, a broke, bruised, and barely licensed architect acquires a crumbling property in the city’s forgotten Sixth Ward. With his left hand in a cast and little more than stubborn vision, he sets out to design and build his first office—helped by Roger, a gifted woodworker pursuing the perfect chair, and Mary, a grounded art teacher who sees through everyone’s pretensions.

Together, they create something beautiful from scraps—part building, part bond. Elegant Simplicity is an autobiographical novel about architecture, friendship, failure, and the fragile structures, emotional and literal, that hold us up when everything else begins to crumble.

A love letter to human hands, honest mistakes, and the grace found in making something that matters. Currently available on Amazon.

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For the screen

Stories extended into film and television.

The Five-Dollar Variable

Six-part limited series. The pilot follows Lorenzo’s discovery on the Baja coast and the uneasy partnership that begins when he refuses to ride away.

2026 Austin Film Festival Second RounderDrama Teleplay Pilot · Top 25% of more than 12,500 submissions

A Coward’s Hero

Screen adaptation of the autobiographical novel, developed from the lived events behind the book.

A Serpent’s Kiss

Feature screenplay.

Maybe It Will Rain

Seven-part miniseries in development.

About Larry

A life lived across disciplines and continents.

Larry Rubenstein is a novelist, screenwriter, retired architect, endurance cyclist, and U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines.

His autobiographical novel, A Coward’s Hero, has received more than 675 reader reviews. Its screenplay adaptation won the top award at the 2024 Depth of Field International Film Festival and was a finalist at the 2024 Cambridge Script Festival. His short story “N.Y. Pinball” appeared in Shades of December in 2001.

His other work includes the literary noir novel and six-part limited series The Five-Dollar Variable, whose pilot was named a 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder in the Drama Teleplay Pilot category, and Elegant Simplicity, reflecting his career in architecture. At its heart, The Forest That Screamed is a quiet homage to craft and devotion, to the truths revealed by the materials we work with, and to the man whose influence helped shape his life.

Rubenstein spent more than a decade living and traveling throughout Southeast Asia, experiences that continue to inform the cultural texture and moral ambiguity of his fiction. He now lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Novels in progress What Remains Intact and Crash Dummy.

Reader & professional inquiries

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