Bøger udgivet af BLACK HERON PR

"In Their Ruin" opens in the colorful, parochial Chicago suburb of Cicero, beginning in the late 1940's when the remnants of the gang once led by Al Capone still existed and ethnic prejudices colored people's opinions. Chester, the Stone family's troubled father, is a bookie as well as a mathematical savant, and his brother is a hitman. Gladys, the mother, is from South Dakota and her family is equally influential in the development of the three children--brothers-- teaching them folk tales and family legends and how to hunt and fish during long summer vacations. As time passes, street gangs exert their power over the brothers' activities, and Gladys worries about her sons' safety as well as her husband's deteriorating mental health and the family's growing financial instability. It all becomes too much for her and ultimately the brothers are left to raise themselves in both conventional and unconventional ways. Their diverging paths and lingering psychic wounds lead to mutual estrangement, setting each brother on an individual journey to redemption. This novel does a brilliant job of presenting Chicago's working class as it was 75 years ago and as it has changed.,

A city, three lives, four decades, poems, drugs, booze, hippies, love, lust, loss-- just keep moving. Some relationships linger across decades and continents, no mater how much individuals change. The links between Patrick, Joanna, Daisy, and San Francisco, though stretched, never snap. San Francisco and the Bay Area are at the heart of this story about three lives evolving over 40 years. When Patrick discovers San Francisco in the summer before the Summer of Love, he is old enough to be drafted for Vietnam, but too young to buy beer. His innocence extends from women to psychedelics. The city will tutor him. Joanna is a Bolinas poet, Daisy her 10-year-old daughter. In a world of lost families, they invent a simulacrum. The city is not just streets and seascapes, but events and the people drawn to and shaped by it. It is North Beach and the Mothers of Invention, City Lights Bookstore and LSD, Hammett's after-midnight fog and the Golden Gate. Patrick leaves and returns, leaves and returns to his default base. Patrick, Joanna, and Daisy-- their histories are entwined with the history of the city. Those were perilous, shifting times, and they rowed their boat through the heart of them.

Lloyd Stollman is retired from the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. He lives in almost total social isolation in a bungalow of the edge of South Central Los Angeles. His isolation and his sense of being contained by forces beyond his control are so relentless that one day he outfits himself as a cowboy, and presents himself to the world as a bit player in famous movies. His success in passing himself off as another person is liberating, and encourages him to explore other personas he can inhabit. But there is a downside, which he realizes when one of his characters turns out to be a killer. Rather than Lloyd's portraying a character of his own creation, he is being inhabited by his characters. If he thought he could control them, that they allowed him liberation from social repression, he is ultimately disabused. He is no more in control of them than he was of himself, the anonymous, middle-aged white man known as Lloyd Stollman. The "character" of Lloyd Stollman is often sympathetic, even likable, sometimes funny in his surprise when things go wrong. This is a sinister book, but one also laced with humor, a thoroughly enjoyable read.