PIKE (23 page)
Authors: Benjamin Whitmer
The Chieu Hoi Saloon
Michael Harris
ISBN: 978-1-60486-112-9
320 pages $19-95
It’s 1992 and three people’s lives are about to collide against the flaming backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Vietnam vet Harry Hudson is a journalist fleeing his past: the war, a failed marriage, and a fear-ridden childhood. Rootless, he stutters, wrestles with depression, and is aware he’s passed the point at which victim becomes victimizer. He explores the city’s lowest dives, the only places
where he feels at home. He meets Mama Thuy, a Vietnamese woman struggling to run a Navy bar in a tough Long Beach neighborhood, and Kelly Crenshaw, an African-American prostitute whose husband is in prison. They give Harry insight that maybe he can do something to change his fate in a gripping story that is both a character study and thriller.
“Mike Harris’ novel has all the brave force and arresting power of Celine and Dostoevsky in its descent into the depths of human anguish and that peculiar gallantry of the moral soul that is caught up in irrational self-punishment at its own failings. Yet Harris manages an amazing and transforming affirmation — the novel floats above all its pain on pure delight in the variety of the human condition. It is a story of those sainted souls who live in bars, retreating from defeat but rendered with such vividness and sensitivity that it is impossible not to care deeply about these figures from our own waking dreams. In an age less obsessed by sentimentality and mawkish ‘uplift,’ this book would be studied and celebrated and emulated.” — John Shannon, author of
The Taking of the Waters
and the Jack Liffey mysteries
“Michael Harris is a realist with a realist’s unflinching eye for the hard truths of contemporary times. Yet in
The Chieu Hoi Saloon
, he gives us a hero worth admiring: the passive, overweight, depressed and sex-obsessed Harry Hudson, who in the face of almost overwhelming despair still manages to lead a valorous life of deep faith. In this powerful and compelling first novel, Harris makes roses bloom in the gray underworld of porno shops, bars and brothels by compassionately revealing the yearning loneliness beneath the grime — our universal human loneliness that seeks transcendence through love.” — Paula Huston, author of
Daughters of Song
and
The Holy Way
“The Chieu Hoi Saloon
concerns one Harry Hudson, the literary bastard son of David Goodis and Dorothy Hughes. Hardcore and unsparing, the story takes you on a ride with Harry in his bucket of a car and pulls you into his subterranean existence in bright daylight and gloomy shadow. One sweet read.” — Gary Phillips, author of
The Jook
Terry Bisson
with an Introduction by
Mumia Abu-Jamal
ISBN: 978-1-60486-087-0 208
pages $15.95
It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army.
Long unavailable in the US, published in France as Nova Africa,
Fire on the Mountain
is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded—and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.
“History revisioned, turned inside out … Bisson’s wild and wonderful imagination has taken some strange turns to arrive at such a destination.” — Madison Smartt Bell, Anisfield-Wolf Award winner and author of
Devil’s Dream
“You don’t forget Bisson’s characters, even well after you’ve finished his books. His
Fire on the Mountain
does for the Civil War what Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle
did for World War Two.” — George Alec Effinger, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for
Shrödinger’s Kitten
, and author of the Marîd Audran trilogy.
“A talent for evoking the joyful, vertiginous experiences of a world at fundamental turning points.” —
Publishers Weekly
“Few works have moved me as deeply, as thoroughly, as Terry Bisson’s
Fire On The Mountain
… With this single poignant story, Bisson molds a world as sweet as banana cream pies, and as briny as hot tears.” — Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row prisoner and author of
Live From Death Row
, from the Introduction.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
ISBN: 978-1-60486-205-8
128 pages $12.00
The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the center of this speculative novel that opens with a real historical event. On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolco by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The massacre of Tlatelolco was erased from the official record as easily as authorities washing the blood from the streets, and no one was ever held accountable.
It is two years later and Nestor, a journalist and participant in the fateful events, lies recovering in the hospital from a knife wound. His fevered imagination leads him in the collection of facts and memories of the movement and its assassination in the company of figures from his childhood. Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth — Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and D’Artagnan among them — to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination.
“Taibo’s writing is witty, provocative, finely nuanced and well worth the challenge.” — Publishers Weekly
“I am his number one fan… I can always lose myself in one of his novels because of their intelligence and humor. My secret wish is to become one of the characters in his fiction, all of them drawn from the wit and wisdom of popular imagination. Yet make no mistake, Paco Taibo—sociologist and historian—is recovering the political history of Mexico to offer a vital, compelling vision of our reality.” — Laura Esquivel, author of
Like Water for Chocolate
“The real enchantment of Mr. Taibo’s storytelling lies in the wild and melancholy tangle of life he sees everywhere.” —
New York Times Book Review
“It doesn’t matter what happens. Taibo’s novels constitute an absurdist manifesto. No matter how oppressive a government, no matter how strict the limitations of life, we all have our imaginations, our inventiveness, our ability to liven up lonely apartments with a couple of quacking ducks. If you don’t have anything left, oppressors can’t take anything away.” —
Washington Post Book World
Tomoyuki Hoshino
ISBN: 978-1-60486-084-9
288 pages $15.95
What happens when a popular and young emperor suddenly dies, and the only person available to succeed him is his sister? How can people in an island country survive as climate change and martial law are eroding more and more opportunities for local sustainability and mutual aid? And what can be done to challenge the rise of a new authoritarian political leadership at a time when the general public is obsessed with fears related to personal and national “security"? These and other provocative questions provide the backdrop for this powerhouse novel about young adults embroiled in what appear to be more private matters – friendships, sex, a love suicide, and struggles to cope with grief and work.
PM Press is proud to bring you this first English translation of a full-length novel by the award-winning author Tomoyuki Hoshino.
“A major novel by Tomoyuki Hoshino, one of the most compelling and challenging writers in Japan today,
Lonely Hearts Killer
deftly weaves a path between geopolitical events and individual experience, forcing a personal confrontation with the political brutality of the postmodern era. Adrienne Hurley’s brilliant translation captures the nuance and wit of Hoshino’s exploration of depths that rise to the surface in the violent acts of contemporary youth.” — Thomas LaMarre, William Dawson Professor of East Asian Studies, McGill University
“Since his debut, Hoshino has used as the core of his writing a unique sense of the unreality of things, allowing him to illuminate otherwise hidden realities within Japanese society. And as he continues to write from this tricky position, it goes without saying that he produces work upon work of extraordinary beauty and power.” — Yuko Tsushima, award-winning Japanese novelist
“Reading Hoshino’s novels is like traveling to a strange land all by yourself. You touch down on an airfield in a foreign country, get your passport stamped, and leave the airport all nerves and anticipation. The area around an airport is more or less the same in any country. It is sterile and without character. There, you have no real sense of having come somewhere new. But then you take a deep breath and a smell you’ve never encountered enters your nose, a wind you’ve never felt brushes against your skin, and an unknown substance rains down upon your head.” — Mitsuyo Kakuta, award-winning Japanese novelist
Rick Dakan
ISBN: 978-1-60486-088-7
272 pages $17.95
