Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (56 page)

Just as the two are beginning to forge a relationship, Derrick Kreiger, a dirty Cincinnati cop, starts to take an unhealthy interest in the girl. Pike and Rory head to Cincinnati to learn what they can about Derrick and the death of Pike's daughter, and the three men circle, evenly matched predators in a human wilderness of junkie squats, roadhouse bars and homeless Vietnam vet encampments.

“Without so much as a sideways glance towards gentility,
Pike
is one righteous mutherfucker of a read. I move that we put Whitmer's balls in a vise and keep slowly notching up the torque until he's willing to divulge the secret of how he managed to hit such a perfect stride his first time out of the blocks.”
— Ward Churchill

“Benjamin Whitmer's
Pike
captures the grime and the rage of my not-so-fair city with disturbing precision. The words don't just tell a story here, they scream, bleed, and burst into flames.
Pike,
like its eponymous main character, is a vicious punisher that doesn't mince words or take prisoners, and no one walks away unscathed. This one's going to haunt me for quite some time.”
— Nathan Singer

“This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice — blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.”
— Stephen Graham Jones

The Chieu Hoi Saloon

Michael Harris

ISBN: 978-1-60486-112-9

376 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

The Wrong Thing

Barry Graham

ISBN: 978-1-60486-451-9

136 pages $14.95

They call him the Kid. He's a killer, a dark Latino legend of the Southwest's urban badlands, “a child who terrifies adults.” They speak of him in whispers in dive bars near closing time. Some claim to have met him. Others say he doesn't exist, a phantom blamed for every unsolved act of violence, a ghost who haunts every blood-splattered crime scene.

But he is real. He's a young man with a love of cooking and reading, an abiding loneliness and an appetite for violence. He is a cipher, a projection of the dreams and nightmares of people ignored by Phoenix's economic boom … and a contemporary outlaw in search of an ordinary life. Love brings him the chance at a new life in the form of Vanjii, a beautiful, damaged woman. But try as he might to abandon the past, his past won't abandon him. The Kid fights back in the only way he knows—and sets in motion a tragic sequence of events that lead him to an explosive conclusion shocking in its brutality and tenderness.

“Graham's words are raw and gritty, and his observations unrelenting and brutally honest.” —
Booklist

“Graham's stories are peopled with the desperate and the mad. A … master.”

— The Times

“Vivid, almost lurid, prose … a talented author.” —
Time Out
(London)

Prudence Couldn't Swim

James Kilgore

ISBN: 978-1-60486-495-3

208 pages $14.95

Set in Oakland, CA, white ex-convict Cal Winter returns home one day to find his gorgeous, young, black wife, Prudence, drowned in the swimming pool. Prudence couldn't swim and Cal concludes she didn't go in the water willingly. Though theirs was a marriage of convenience, he takes the murder personally. Along with his prison homie Red Eye, Cal sets out to find out who did Prudence in. His convoluted and often darkly humorous journey takes him deep into the world of the sexual urges of the rich and powerful, and gradually reveals the many layers of his wife's complex identity. While doing so, Cal and Red Eye must confront their own racially charged pasts if the killer is to be caught.

Author James Kilgore has woven together strands of his own quixotic and complicated life—twenty-seven years as a political fugitive, two decades as a teacher in Africa, and six years in prison—into a heady tale of mystery and consequences.

“James Kilgore's writing is a refreshing blend of literary talent and political insight; something sorely missing from much of the fiction penned by writers on the Left. His wit, swift pacing, and dead-on characterization are skillfully woven into an unflinching vision for radical change and social justice. So often we are told that a commitment to radical change and a rollicking good read mix like oil and water. Along comes Kilgore to put that lie to rest!”
— Frank B. Wilderson III, author of
Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid

“James Kilgore is a masterful writer, and as a U.S. activist who has lived in Africa most of his adult life, Kilgore is able to connect us to politics and culture as no other writer. This character-driven mystery promises to find a devoted following.”
— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of
Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.

FOUND IN TRANSLATION
from PM Press

Calling All Heroes: A Manual for Taking Power

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