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CRUST Walter Linchuk is an aged writer and author of the Complete Series (The Complete Book of Aids, 9/11, Terrorism) whose name has often been discussed as a strong possibility for the Nobel Prize, suffering from a seven month plague of writer's block that New York Magazine says, "for candor and anguish, surpasses any we have on record." One morning Linchuk wakes to find a crust in his nose - the "definitive crust of his life" - that awakens him to a new world of desire and enlightenment. What ensues is a comedic, Orwellian journey through our hyper-technological age, where everyone has a blog, where media endorsements mean everything, where entire societal movements are determined by chess players at major corporations, where MIT professors debate the tenants of Nasalism, where even our most natural desires can be turned into drugs and patented. [Read on.] | |
BENEATH THE PINES Beneath the Pines examines a Southern family's conflicting values about sex, religion, and the past. In 1957, Mary Alice McDonnell was a rebellious teenager in love with a rich Yankee boy, Michael Harrison, who had just moved to her small Virginia mountain town - much to the chagrin of her strict, God-fearing mother, Lavinia. By 2004, Mary Alice has become a sixty-three year old, spinster Biology teacher who hasn't spoken to her mother in over forty years. When Lavinia dies, Mary Alice's graduate-student niece, Claire, inherits the family house and moves to Virginia, bringing along a deep curiosity about her family's dark past, as well as news of the long-lost Michael Harrison - and plenty of emotional baggage of her own. [Read on.] | |
EROTOMANIA: A Romance Erotomania traces the development of James and Monica, from a couple that is forced to move to a nuclear fall-out bunker so their explosive sex life doesn't physically harm their neighbors, to James' one-night bout with alcoholism, to Monica's sexually-fueled obsession wtih abstractionist expressionism, to marriage counseling, to a new-found reliance on reality television and microwaveable meals. [Read on.] | |
THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER In his fifth novel, Rudolph Wurlitzer has written a classic tale of the western frontier and created one of his most memorable characters in Zebulon, a mountain man whose view of life has been challenged by a curse from a mysterious Native American woman whose love he inadvertently murdered. The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series of tragic love triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions of life, love, and death. [Read on.] | |
1940 Set on the eve of America's entry into World War Two, award-winning novelist Jay Neugeboren's first new novel in two decades, is built around a fascinating historical figure, Dr. Eduard Bloch, an Austrian doctor who had been physician to Adolf Hitler and his family when Hitler was a boy and young man, and who cared for Hitler's mother during her illness and death from breast cancer. The historical Bloch was the only Jew for whom Hitler ever personally arranged departure from Europe, and he must now, living in the Bronx, face accusations over the special treatment he received from the Nazi dictator. 1940 focuses on Dr. Bloch's relationship with Elizabeth Rofman, a medical illustrator at Johns Hopkins Medical School, who has come to New York from Baltimore to visit her father, only to find that he has, mysteriously, disappeared. The story grows more complex when Elizabeth's son Daniel, a disturbed young adolescent, escapes from the institution in Maryland where his parents have committed him, and makes his way to New York, where he is hidden and protected by his mother... and by Dr. Bloch. [Read on.] |
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LIFE ON THE LEDGE | |
VAGABOND BLUES |
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THE DRUMMERa novel by Anthony Neil Smith *JANUARY MAGAZINE: Notable Book of 2006* "Smith writes with force and clarity...The Drummer is set in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina and is studded with heartbreaking scenes of a cultural life that has virtually disappeared." -CHICAGO TRIBUNE- "Anthony Neil Smith is a man with more than enough experience and balls to write noir the way it should be written: hard and fast with a twist of gallows humor to make it go down smooth. As with his first novel, Psychosomatic, The Drummer is sharp and expertly written. But The Drummer has an accessibility that will make this the book to read this summer." -CRIME SPREE- "Anthony Neil Smith has penned a masterpiece of heavy metal noir." -VICTOR GISCHLER- [Read on.] |