Bücher veröffentlicht von Counterpoint

By 1929, the brief, brilliant career of Bix Beiderbecke??self?taught cornetist, pianist, and composer??had already become legend. From the summer of '26 at Hudson Lake, Indiana, when his genius blazed forth with a strange, doomed incandescence, Bix's career tragically reflected the chaotic impulses of a country suddenly awash in wealth, power, and a profound cynicism. Shy, elusive, inarticulate, Bix was beloved by both the raccoon?coated campus crowd and the men who nightly played alongside him. He is still celebrated in a yearly festival in his hometown of Davenport, Iowa.And that is where the novel begins, Davenport and the Bix Fest. Then it travels back in time to focus on the highlights of a meteoric career: a Capone?controlled nightclub in 1926; the grueling cross?country tours with Paul Whiteman's Symphonic Jazz orchestra; the disastrous Whiteman trip to California to make the first all?color talkie musical; the stock market crash of 1929 that finds Bix in an asylum, victim of the era's signature product, bootleg gin; and finally, Bix's dying efforts to combine his piano compositions into a suite that would be the pinnacle of his life's work and his evocation of his time and place.Colored by some of the age's most popular characters??Maurice Ravel, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Clara Bow?? 1929 brilliantly illuminates a period in history, personified in the gifted, compelling, and melancholy figure of Bix Beiderbecke.

An evocative historical novel that explores the rising influence of Dickenss work in mid-19th century London through the journey of a young womans struggle against poverty and injustice.In the winter of 1836, a young journalist named Charles Dickens held an infant in his arms. Only eight months of age, Ruby Spriggs was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London. Crushing poverty seemed her only future.Through the intervention of kind patrons, the child blossoms into a young woman instilled with a love of learning and books. But the forces that Dickens fought against for most of his life threaten to destroy her.At the heart of The Bakers Tale is Ruby Spriggs; Edwin Chatfield, the young man who would be her lover; Alexander Murd, the scheming coal baron who would destroy them; Abraham Hart, a dwarf who befriends Ruby in a faraway land; and Octavius Joy, a 19th-century philanthropist cut from unique cloth.Meticulously researched and masterfully told, The Bakers Tale recreates the voice of beloved author Charles Dickens in gorgeous prose brimming with the atmosphere of historical London. It's a gripping tale of obsession, corruption, hope, and love instilled with the unequaled passion of Dickenss social conscience.

Recently widowed, unhappily stuck on a pricey whiplash tour of Italy, Elizabeth Berman comes face to face with the first documented painting of a teardrop in human history, and in the presence of that tearful mother, and the arresting company of the renowned and anonymous women painted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, she wakes up to the possibility that she is not lost.Mitchell left me everything, just as he promised. "Everything," he liked to say during his last month on the sofa, "everything will be yours," as if it wasn't yet. I was left with that and two adult children who could not tolerate my sitting in my home by myself—admittedly, rather too often in a capacious pink flannel nightgown and the green cardigan Mitchell was wearing on the afternoon he died.That's how Elizabeth winds up on a tour better suited to her late–husband, a Dante scholar. Mitchell masterminded the itinerary as a surprise for their thirty–fifth wedding anniversary.Itching to leave as soon as she arrives in Padua, Elizabeth's efforts to book a ticket home are stymied by her aggressively supportive children, the ministrations of an incomprehensibly Italian hotel staff, and the prospect of forfeiting the sizable

Arm yourself against my dawn, which may at any moment cast you and Harry into obscurity, Alice James writes her brother William in 1891. In Judith Hooper's magnificent novel, zingers such as this fly back and forth between the endlessly articulate and letter–writing Jameses, all of whom are geniuses at gossiping.And the James family did, in fact, know everyone intellectually important on both sides of the Atlantic, but by the time we meet her in 1889, Alice has been sidelined and is lying in bed in Leamington, England, after taking London by storm.We don't know what's wrong with Alice. No one does, though her brothers have inventive theories, and the best of medical science offers no help. So, with Alice in bed, we travel to London and Paris, where the James children spent part of their unusual childhood. We sit with her around the James family's dinner table, as she – the youngest and the only girl – listens to the intellectual elite of Boston, missing nothing. The book is accompanied by Hooper's Afterword,"What was Wrong with Alice?," an analysis of the varied psychological ills of the James family and Alice's own medical history.

In the last one hundred years, imported water has transformed the environment of the Golden State and its quality of life, with land ownership patterns and real estate boosterism dramatically altering both urban and rural communities. The key to this transformation has been expanded access to water from the Eastern Sierra, the Colorado River, and Northern California rivers. "Whoever brings the water, brings the people," wrote engineer William Mulholland, under whose leadership the process of growth through irrigation began. Now, using first–person voices of Californians to reveal the resulting changes, author David Carle concludes that it may be time to stop drowning the California dream of the good life with imported water. Using oral histories, contemporary newspaper articles, and autobiographies, Carle explores the historic changes in California, showing how imported water has shaped the pattern of population growth in the state. Because water choices remain the primary tool for shaping California's future, Carle also argues that it is possible to improve both the state's damaged environment and the quality of life if Californians will step out of this historic pattern and embrace limited water supplies as a fact of life in this naturally dry region.

Four decades ago aged twenty the author experienced what he calls a negative satori, a fundamental and irrefutable realization not of enlightenment, but of himself as a predicament only enlightenment could resolve. This, shaped by the hammer blows of a singular American professor, Richard DeMartino, brought him to Zen, and to Japan. Yet over time, of far greater import than his bungling efforts were the wonderful occupants of the Zen world he encountered: Toyoshima-san, the meditation Prometheus whose superhuman efforts astounded and inspired all while he remained impaled on the cliffs edge; the Thief, chief monastery monk who stole the world from whoever he encountered and whose yawns and the brushing of his teeth shot sparks of Absolute Meaning; Hisamatsu, the great lay Zen Master who at age 16 overheard a doctor tell his mother hed be dead in six months, only to awaken ten years later and become the most delighted man in Japan; Bunko, the monk kind to others but ferocious with himself, whose daily state of Oneness in meditation left him dissatisfied because despite all exertion he could not crush it to pieces and break beyond it.These are among the sitters for the portraits in Reports From the Zen Wars, Steve Antinoffs attempt to bear witness to what for him has been The Greatest Show on Earth, price of admission one lotus position.

I had always thought that when I was around 84 and Robin was 80 we could collaborate on a book about the golden years of his career where he could look at my photographs and reminisce about the events and his feelings at the time. Unfortunately, that book was never to be . . . .Photographer Arthur Grace first met Robin Williams in April 1986, at a comedy club in Pittsburgh where Williams was working to polish what would eventually become his award-winning special Evening at the Met. The two hit it off immediately, and thus blossomed a close friendship that carried them through their increasingly successful careers. Told through a series of stunning photographs of Williams taken by Grace over the course of this decades-long partnership, Robin Williams: A Singular Portrait offers a touching and up-close look at the real Robin Williamsthe manic and happy, the pensive and weary, the engaged and disengaged, a true portrait of one of Americas greatest comics and most beloved actors.For the millions of people around the globe that Robin Williams has touched, these images, more than 150 photographs, a glorious mixture of stunning color and resonating black and white presented in exhibit format, will be something to embrace and cherish, not simply because of their exclusivity, but because of their intimacy and their honesty.

This a hilarious memoir of Clancy Sigal’s escapades as a young Hollywood agent on the Sunset Strip, peddling writers and actors in a blacklist-crazed “golden age” movie industry of the 1950s. Atom bomb tests light up the night sky, and everyone is either naming names or getting named in the McCarthy witch hunt. By day a fast-talking salesman, at night he’s the point person of a small circle of anarchistic oddballs. He’s dogged by two FBI agents who want to be set up with starlets and have a screen test. They trail him as he goes from studio to studio hustling clients like Humphrey Bogart, Donna Reed, Jack Palance, Peter Lorre and Stanwyck. Barred from a studio he brazenly uses a bolt cutter to break through the chainlink fence to make a deal.Black Sunset’s riproaring ribald style belongs to a hardboiled school that includes Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler. He is one of the few remaining witnesses and reporters of this absurd and terrifying time.

Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign.A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker's tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing "Rockford Files" reruns on the passenger seat; and a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance; a Poe–obsessed medical examiner constructs ornate scenes in an attempt to provoke hope in the forgotten lives of a dark and desperate city.Told through Rock's imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation, and the relationship between the two.

Surprise Attack explores sixty plus years of military and terror threats against the United States. It examines the intelligence tools and practices that provided warnings of those attacks and evaluates the United States' responses, both in preparedness – and most importantly – the effectiveness of our military and national command authority.Contrary to common claims, the historical record now shows that warnings, often very solid warnings, have preceded almost all such attacks, both domestic and international. Intelligence practices developed early in the Cold War, along with intelligence collection techniques have consistently produced accurate warnings for our national security decision makers. Surprise Attack traces the evolution and application of those practices and explores why such warnings have often failed to either interdict or intercept actual attacks.Going beyond warnings, Surprise Attack explores the real world performance of the nation's military and civilian command and control history – exposing disconnects in the chain of command, failures of command and control and fundamental performance issues with national command authority.America has faced an ongoing series of threats, from the attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines in 1941, through the crises and confrontations of the Cold War, global attacks on American personnel and facilities to the contemporary violence of jihadi terrorism. With a detailed study of those threats, the attacks related to them, and America's response, a picture of what works – and what doesn't – emerges. The attacks have been tragic and we see the defensive preparations and response often ineffective. Yet lessons can be learned from the experience; Surprise Attack represents a comprehensive effort to identify and document those lessons.

Aaron Aaronsohn was one of the most extraordinary figures in the early struggle to create a homeland for the Jewish people. Brought to Palestine at age five, as a young man Aaronsohn was a rugged adventurer who became convinced during years of solo explorations that water should govern the region's fate. He compiled both the areas first detailed water maps and a plan for Palestines national borders that predicted andin its insistence on partnership between Arabs and Jewsmight have prevented the decades of conflict to come. In World War I, he ran a spy network with his sister, Sarah, that enabled the British to capture Jerusalem but also made him the rival of his colleague T.E. Lawrence. There is evidence that beautiful, rebellious Sarah, who died tragically in 1917, was the only woman the enigmatic Lawrence ever loved. Ultimately, Aaron Aaronsohn also paid for his devotion to the new nation with his life. A history that speaks directly to the present, Aaronsohns Maps reveals for the first time Aaronsohns key role in establishing Israel and the enduring importance of Aaronsohns maps in Middle Eastern politics today.

What had happened to my baby brother? How did a tiny little pill shatter our family? When did we first begin losing Pat?These are the harrowing questions that plagued Erin Marie Daly after her youngest brother Pat, an OxyContin addict, was found dead of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty. In just a few short years, the powerful prescription painkiller had transformed him from a fun-loving ball of energy to a heroin addict hell-bent on getting his next fix. Yet even as Pat’s addiction destroyed his external life, his internal struggle with opiates was far more heart-wrenching. Erin set out on a painful personal journey, turning a journalistic eye on her brother’s addiction; in the process, she was startled to discover a new twist to the ongoing prescription drug epidemic. That kids are hooked on prescription drugs is nothing new what is new is the rising number of young heroin addicts whose addiction began with pills in suburban bedrooms, and how a generation of young people playing around with today’s increasingly powerful opiods are finding themselves in the frightening grip of heroin.While many books a have tackled the topic of Big Pharma, drug addiction, and our increasingly over-medicated society, Generation Rx offers an entirely new look at what the prescription pill epidemic means for today’s youth and the world around them.

Stefanie and Henry are Americans living in Prague; she works for the State Department, he is a rare books dealer. They live the life of a comfortably married couple—morning coffee at the same café every day, social events with the same small group of friends, a little too much to drink in the evenings and a single episode of Poirot every night before bed. Until one day their world is turned upside down by the arrival from the States of Stefanie's old friend, Selma Al–Khateeb whose husband has been mysteriously arrested and indefinitely imprisoned. At first it appears that Selma has come to escape her problems, but soon her reasons for coming to Prague grow sinister and murky. Stefanie and Henry's placid existence is turned upside down in ways they couldn't have imagined.

Running so hard you think you'll choke on your next breath. Lungs burning like they're drenched in battery acid. Peripheral vision blurred by the same adrenaline that drowns out the cheers coming from the full stadium. And of course, the reporters. The men scribbling furiously on their notepads so they can publish every stumble, sprain, and sniffle in these historic games.This was the world of the female athletes in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, the first games in which women were allowed to compete (and on a trial basis, at that). Nicknamed "the Peerless Four," the Canadian track team included some of the strongest and most diversely talented women on the scene. Narrated by the team's chaperone—a former runner herself—the women embark on their journey with the same golden goals as every other Olympian, male or female. But as the Olympic tension begins to rise with unexpected injuries, heartbreaking disqualifications, and the pressure of supreme athletic performance, each woman discovers new fears and new priorities, all while the weight of women's future in the Olympics rests on their performance poise.The Peerless Four is more than a sports novel, more than a record of how far women's rights have come in the past 75 years. It's a meditation on sacrifice, loyalty, commitment, perseverance, and the courage to live a true underdog tale.

Originally published in 1982 to wide acclaim, The Good Son remains Craig Novas undisputed masterpiece. This classic explored the complicated entanglements of fathers and sons expressed in the story of nouvue-riche father Pop Mackinnon, who used his wealth to manipulate his son Chip into the right kind of marriage upon the young mans return from World War II.Chip eventually gave up the love of his life and married to secure his future and what were the consequences of that decision? All the Dead Yale Men answers that question in telling the story of Frank Mackinnon, son of Chip, a prosecutor in Boston with a happy marriage and a daughter set to follow his footsteps into law school. Chips death throws Frank into his familys legacy, where he must contend with the inheritance of the Mackinnons beloved land and a bevy of secrets that dates back three generations. And when Franks daughter Pia falls under the sway of local bad boy Aurlon Miller, his grief over his fathers death triggers the family legacy of social standing and manipulation to begin anew, leading Frank to the darkest edges of what a father will do to protect the ones he loves.All the Dead Yale Men examines the end of an era, how privilege and inheritance often crumble in the face of the modern world, a story enriched by the setting and mythology of Boston and its surroundings. The novel not only moves the Mackinnons story forward but will recast historical elements of the classic novel as well, heralding the arrival of a new American classic.

Celebrity and crime pay off big time for an American sociopath in Paris in “one of the great joys in new noir fiction” (Los Angeles Review of Books).Dr. Crandall Taylor—or rather the actor who plays him—is enjoying a cushy new life in the City of the Lights where his now–cancelled American soap opera has become a prime time retro cult hit. This newfound stardom isn’t wasted on him. Anxious to keep his brutal past a secret from fans, he’s enjoying all the fruits that fame has to offer: adulation, entrée into the trendiest clubs, and sex. What he really wants is to fund a feature film.Crandall uses his charm and intellect to draw into his narcissistic web four women: a horny network executive; an internet porn star; a bookish university student with a nasty bent; and the fetching starlet wife of an arms dealer. Crandall accepts both the crime lord’s cash and his beautiful wife’s advances. Big mistake. Now Crandall must channel his violent, megalomaniacal dark side just to stay alive—and on the run.From the national bestselling author of The Ice Harvest comes “an ingeniously twisty old–school noir along the lines of James M. Cain” (Spinetingler Magazine). With it, the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know . . . quintessential American huckster . . . and in Phillip’s sly, deft hands we find ourselves sinking down eagerly with him, glorying in the beautiful muck” (Edgar Award–winning author Megan Abbott).

Two-Part Inventions begins when Suzanne, a concert pianist, dies suddenly of a stroke in the New York City apartment she shares with her producer husband Philip. Rather than mourn in peace, Philip becomes deeply paranoid: their life is based on a fraud and the acclaimed music the couple created is about to be exposed. Philip had built a career for his wife by altering her recordings, taking a portion of a song here and there, from recordings of other pianists. Syncing the alterations seamlessly, he created a piece of flawless music with Suzanne getting sole credit.In this urban, psychological novel, author Lynne Sharon Schwartz brilliantly guides the reader through a flawed marriage and calculated career. Beginning with Suzannes death and moving backwards in time, Schwartz examines their life together, and her remarkable career, while contemplating the nature of truth, marriage and the pursuit of perfection.

It is Arab Spring and the fate of the Christians of the Middle East is uncertain. The many Christians of Lebanon are walking a knife-edge, their very survival in their ancestral refuge in doubt, as the Lebanese government becomes Hezbollah-dominated, while Syria convulses with warring religious factions. Anti Lebanon is a cross-genre political thriller and horror story embedded within these recent events, featuring a multiethnic Christian family living out the lingering after-effects of Lebanon's civil war as it struggles to deal with its phantoms, its ghosts, and its vampires.Leon Elias is a young and impoverished Lebanese man whose older sister had joined a Christian militia and has been killed. He becomes caught up in the recent "e;little war"e; in Beirut, when the Shia resistance/militia Hezbollah takes over most of the city. In this milieuthe emptied streets of Christian east Beirut, the old shell-scarred sandstone villas, the echoing gunfirehe becomes involved, only partly by choice, in the theft of a seriously valuable piece of artisanal jewelry, and is bittenlike a vampireby its Armenian maker.Events take a ghostly and mysterious turn as the factions jostling for power in Beirut begin to align against him and his family, and he is forced to flee the sullied beauty of that wonderful and pitiful country, in this story of love and loss, of the civil war and the Arabization of the Switzerland of the Middle East, and of contemporary vampiresbeings addicted to violence, lies, and baser primal drives.Carl Shuker is a remarkable writer. A storyteller in the tradition of Celine and J. G. Ballard, no one alive writes better sentences. Anti Lebanon will delight his fans and entrance anyone new to his fine work.

The work of John Jodzio has already made waves across the literary community. Some readers noticed his nimble blending of humor with painful truths reminded them of George Saunders. His creativity and fresh voice reminded others of Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. But with his new collection, Jodzio creates a class of his own.Knockout is the unified collection of stories that create flawless portraits of deeply flawed figures on the edge of the American Dream. A recovering drug addict gets tricked into stealing a tiger. A man buys a used sex chair from his neighbor. A woman suffering from agoraphobia raises her son completely indoors. An alcoholic runs a bed and breakfast with the son from his deceased wife's first marriage. These people will admit that their chances have passed them by. These people know they were born on the wrong side of the tracks, and their dreams will remain unreachable, but that doesn't stop them from dreaming. Yet readers won’t be fooled by the funny premises —Jodzio steers these stories into deeper places, creating a brilliant examination of those on the fringes of modern life.With its quirky humor, compelling characters, and unexpected sincerity, Knockout by John Jodzio is poised to become his breakout book, drawing a wide readership to this provocative and talented young writer.

The Last Animal by Abby Geni is that rare literary find a remarkable series of stories unified around one theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss, and family life. These are vibrant, weighty stories that herald the arrival of a young writer of surprising feeling and depth.Terror Birds tracks the dissolution of a marriage set against an ostrich farm in the sweltering Arizona desert; Dharma at the Gate features the tempest of young love as a teenaged girl must choose between mans best friend, her damaged boyfriend, and a beckoning future; Captivity follows an octopus handler at an aquarium still haunted by the disappearance of her brother years ago; The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr details a Greek chorus of Jewish girls at a summer camp whose favorite counselor goes missing under suspicious circumstances; In the Spirit Room centers on a scientist suffering the heartbreaking loss of a parent from Alzheimers while living in the natural history museum where they both worked; in Fire Blight a father grieving over his wifes recent miscarriage finds an outlet for comfort in their backyard garden and makes a surprising discovery on how to cherish living things; and in the title story, a retired woman traces the steps of the husband who left her thirty years ago, burning the letters he had sent along the way, while the luminous and exotic wildlife of the Pacific Ocean opens up to receive her.Unflinching, exciting, ambitious and yet heartfelt, The Last Animal will guide readers through a menagerie of settings and landscapes as it underscores the connection among all living things.

Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies looks at how film shapes identity. Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love.Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style.Rather than being a means of escape or object of mere entertainment, Ison posits that cinema is a more engaging form of art, a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realities. A way to orient oneself into the world. Reeling Though Life is a compelling look at one popular art form and how it has influenced our identities in provocative and important ways.

Callum Littlefield walks a fine line between arrogant overconfidence and self-deprecating insecurity. After being ostracized by his peers and getting thrown out of his New England boarding school, Callum’s parents exile him to his aging grandmother’s Gold Coast estate on Long Island. He is promptly put to work with her smattering of servants, and is forced to interact with his old Macumba-practicing Brazilian nanny.Though Callum reunites with old friends and tries his hand at the prep school party scene, he soon tires of his duties and escapes back to his family's empty Manhattan townhouse. There he meets a young girl named Layla, who changes his life in more ways than even he can understand.In one summer, Callum finds love, adventure, death, and heartbreak, all the while offering us a detailed social commentary on his blue blood, eastern surroundings.

Don Carpenter was one of the finest novelists working in the west. His first novel, A Hard Rain Falling, first published in 1966, has been championed by Richard Price, and George Pelacanos who called it "a masterpiece…the definitive juvenile–delinquency novel and a damning indictment of our criminal justice system," is considered a classic. His novel A Couple of Comedians is thought by some the best novel about Hollywood ever written.He was a close friend of Evan Connell and other San Francisco writers, but his closest friendship was with Richard Brautigan, and when Brautigan killed himself, Carpenter tried for some time to write a biography of his remarkable, deeply troubled friend.He finally abandoned that in favor of writing a novel. Friday's at Enricos, the story of four writers living in Northern California and Portland during the early, heady days of the Beat scene. A time of youth and opportunity, this story mixes the excitement of beginning with the melancholy of ambition, often thwarted and never satisfied. Loss of innocence is only the first price you pay. These are people, men and women, tender with expectation, at risk and in love, and Carpenter also carefully draws a portrait of these two remarkable places, San Francisco and Portland, in the 50s and early 60s, when the writers and bohemians were busy creating the groundwork for what came to be the counterculture.A great champion of Don Carpenter, Jonathan Lethem, has taken on the task of editing and developing this last draft into the shape we imagine Carpenter would have himself accomplished had he lived to see this through. And Lethem provides a wonderful introduction to this book, to Carpenter, and to the broad influence of his work which resonates until this very day.

Video stores are dying. But most of you don’t care. You’ve got your Netflix and your DVR, so why deal with VHS tapes or scratched DVDs? Why deal with the grumpy guy at the worn-down independent video store?That grumpy guy is Waring Wax, and he’s usually too drunk to worry about his declining business at Star Video, let alone his quickly evolving extinction in popular culture. But everything changes in his small college town when a bright and shiny Blockbuster Video opens nearby: Clearly, this means war. So, Waring enlists the help of his two reluctant employees, charismatic but conflicted Alaura and desperate virgin Jeff, to hatch a series of wild schemes to save their little store. Together, these three misfits try to save Star Video while confronting, among other things, Waring’s self-destructive tendencies, a life training cult, corporate bicycle gangs, and a Hollywood director who constantly sees the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.The Last Days of Video is a hilarious elegy for a bygone era, a quirky and charming story of redemption for a group of loveable cinema freaks, and a love letter to the art of the movies.

Cementville has a breathtaking set up: 1969. A small Kentucky town, known only for its excellent bourbon and passable cement, direct from the factory that gives the town its name. The favored local sons of Cementville's most prominent families all joined the National Guard hoping to avoid the draft and the killing fields of Vietnam. They were sent to combat anyway, and seven boys were killed in a single, horrific ambush.The novel opens as the coffins are making their way home, along with one remaining survivor, the now–maimed town quarterback recently rescued from a Vietnamese prison camp. Yet the return of the bodies sets off something inside of the town itself —a sense of violence, a political reality, a gnawing unease with the future — and soon, new bodies start turning up around town, pushing the families of Cementville into further alienation and grief.Presented as the Our Town of its time, we'll meet Maureen, the young sister of a recently returned solider who attempts to document the strange changes going on in her town; Harlan O'Brien, a war hero just rescued from three years in a POW camp whose PTSD starts bending his mind in terrifying ways; Evelyn Slidell, the wealthy icon and oldest woman in town, a descendent of the its founders and no stranger to what grief does to a family; Giang Smith, the ‘war bride' who flees the violence of Vietnam with her new American husband only to encounter echoes of it in her new home; and the notorious Ferguson clan, led by the violent Levon and his draft–dodging younger brother Byard, who carry a secret that could further tear the town apart.With the Civil Rights Act only a few years old, a restless citizenry divided over the war, and the Women's Movement sending tremors through established assumptions about family life, Cementville provides a microcosm of a society shedding the old order and learning how to live with grief — a situation with resonant echoes concerning war and community still being confronted today.

Four Corners is a bare-knuckled debut novel about life, love, and violence along four states of the American southwest — both a savage, mean-streets thriller and a heartbreaking story of unfortunate love. For the better part of thirty-seven years, Frank Bruce has hobbled through life, dragging his hunger for amphetamines, alcohol, and crime behind him like a heap of tarnished weight. Now, emboldened by the love of his child-fiancé Maddie Nicole, Frank goes on the run through the drug underworld of the Southwest trying to save a young boy from his meth-riddled father and casino mogul grandfather. Caught in a cat-and-mouse chase but still determined to protect what he loves, Frank seeks help from his onetime mentor, legendary drug kingpin Jon Santer. But in doing so, Frank triggers a vile reckoning with his terrible, violent past.