Bøger af Don Swaim

In 1964, after the assassination of Fidel Castro and "The Destruction" that led to the annihilation of much of the East Coast, President Kennedy moves the nation's capital to Wichita, Kansas, where Robert works as a copywriter for the ad agency Batton, Bumstead, Durstine, and Osborn. Hoping to receive the permission of Norman Mailer to join an exclusive writers colony in the besieged city of Estonia (formerly Easton), Pennsylvania, Robert, haunted by his muse Emily Dickinson, contrives to brave the ravaged, desolated inland to Brooklyn (Bruh-Klyn). But BBD&O's nefarious founder, Burt Bumstead, instead orders Robert to assassinate Mailer, and assigns the gorgeous Eldritch Djinn as Robert's accomplice. In their deadly odyssey, Robert and Eldritch are set upon by contract killers in Kansas, pirates along the Kansas and Missouri Canal, zombies in Illinois, suicidal gun molls in Ohio, and rebellious gunslingers in Pennsylvania. A deadly reprisal by halflings brings this non-stop alternate-universe adventure to its astonishing conclusion.

1948 is a leap year and a good one for Harry S. Truman. The second-hand book dealers on Manhattan’s Fourth Avenue are in full swing. Howard inherits his father’s shabby bookshop, but Howard isn’t a true bookman, and he knows how little money there is in the business—until a seemingly priceless manuscript falls into his lap. But there’s something odd about it. Howard decides to check out his treasure with an acerbic fellow in Baltimore, a man Howard’s late father believed could solve all literary problems: H. L. Mencken. The results are deadly.

Like Carlos Fuentes's The Old Gringo, this absorbing novel...tracks Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) south of the border as the American journalist and short story writer journeys with Pancho Villa into the maelstrom of the Mexican Revolution... Fans of Bierce's writing should enjoy this semibiographical tale with a suspenseful plot as wild as some of his more fantastical works.-Publishers Weekly In The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story, expect to be entertained - to laugh and sneer and shiver - expect to think - on life, on death, on love - and expect to feel - pain, anger, desire - but most importantly, expect to find out what happened to Ambrose Bierce when he left his home without looking back, and faded into the white dust of Mexico.> This novel is a fiction based on Ambrose Bierce, who mysteriously vanished in Mexico in 1913. In summary: The 71-year-old Bierce crosses into revolutionary Mexico where he encounters Pancho Villa. Not only does Bierce save Pancho's life but develops a close relationship with the bandito-supremo. Dreaming of death and reliving the past, Bierce accompanies Pancho through exhilarating war-time adventures until the two men find themselves in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1915. There, Bierce meets a handsome young widow, and discovers he still has the capability of falling in love, despite the difference in their ages. Through flashbacks and literary digressions the reader learns about Bierce's turbulent early life and his associations with such historical figures as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Gladstone, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Roosevelt, P.T. Barnum, and William Randolph Hearst. The reader also sees Bierce's development as a chronicler of the horrors of the Civil War, his conversion into a cynic and misanthrope, his role as a major literary arbiter, and finally as a man who learns to love in his twilight years.