by John King
—Gareth Evans, The Independent
“King’s eye for detail is as sharp as his characters’ tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and fucked up the next. Like real people, then.”
—The Face
Headhunters
John King
ISBN: 978-1-62963-226-1
320 pages
Headhunters is the story of five friends. Carter USM is a live wire who lives on the edge and tries not to think too much; Mango can’t stop thinking, has made money but is weighed down by family tragedy; Harry is a beer-lover and dreamer; Balti is his drinking partner, out of work and hoping for a fresh start; while Will is the quiet romantic, a voice of reason as the lives of the others become increasingly chaotic and veer towards disaster.
Headhunters is also a story of London. The novel is rooted in its streets, workplaces, pubs and music, but a parallel society exists, where the planet’s wealthy are able to buy and sell whatever they like. This is a world from which the Londoners of this novel are excluded, resentment too often directed against their own kind. The Unity is the boys’ local pub and it is here that they form a tongue-in-cheek Sex Division to celebrate a new year. Based on the idea of a football league, the most Woman can offer Man is four points—unless she leaves her handbag unattended.
Carter is the Unstoppable Sex Machine and soon leads the table, while Mango breaks the rules and buys success. Harry and Balti are overweight and hard up, know they have little to offer apart from their personalities, turn to cold lager and hot curries instead of sex. Will falls in loves and retires. Recognition of the affinities between the sexes soon becomes clear. Background is more important than gender.
Headhunters mixes humor and longing as the real feelings of these men break through, moving beyond expectations. A missing brother, prophetic visions, genuine romance and a tit-for-tat confrontation draw the characters out into the open—revealing the individuals behind the words and their craving for respect. Events run out of control, but several happy endings seem possible.
“John King is the authentic voice of contemporary London.”
—Michael Moorcock
Everyone Has Their Reasons
Joseph Matthews
ISBN: 978-1-62963-094-6
528 pages
On November 7, 1938, a small, slight seventeen-year-old Polish-German Jew named Herschel Grynszpan entered the German embassy in Paris and shot dead a consular official. Three days later, in supposed response, Jews across Germany were beaten, imprisoned, and killed, their homes, shops, and synagogues smashed and burned—Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
Based on the historical record and told through his “letters” from German prisons, the novel begins in 1936, when fifteen-year-old Herschel flees Germany. Penniless and alone, he makes it to Paris where he lives hand-to-mouth, his shadow existence mixing him with the starving and the wealthy, with hustlers, radicals, and seamy sides of Paris nightlife. In 1938, the French state rejects refugee status for Herschel and orders him out of the country. Soon after, the Nazis round up all Polish Jews in Germany—including Herschel’s family—and dump them on the Poland border. Herschel’s response is to shoot the German official, then wait calmly for the French police. June 1940, Herschel is still in prison awaiting trial when the Nazi army nears Paris. He is evacuated but escapes and seeks protection at a prison in the far south of France. Two weeks later the French state hands him to the Gestapo. The Nazis plan a big show trial, inviting the world press to Berlin for the spectacle, to demonstrate through Herschel that Jews had provoked the war. Except that Herschel throws a last-minute wrench in the plans, bringing the Nazi propaganda machine to a grinding halt. Hitler himself postpones the trial and orders that no decision be made about Herschel’s fate until the Führer personally gives an order—one way or another.
“A tragic, gripping Orwellian tale of an orphan turned assassin in pre-World War II Paris. Based on the true story of the Jewish teen Hitler blamed for Kristallnacht, it’s a wild ride through the underside of Europe as the storm clouds of the Holocaust gather. Not to be missed!”
—Terry Bisson, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of Fire on the Mountain
Fire on the Mountain
Terry Bisson with an introduction by Mumia Abu-Jamal
ISBN: 978-1-60486-087-0
208 pages
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, prisoner and author of Live From Death Row, from the Introduction.
Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet
Michael Moorcock with an introduction by Alan Wall
ISBN: 978-1-60486-491-5
400 pages
Meet Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, also known as Pyat. Tsarist rebel, Nazi thug, continental conman, and reactionary counterspy: the dark and dangerous anti-hero of Michael Moorcock’s most controversial work.
Published in 1981 to great critical acclaim—then condemned to the shadows and unavailable in the U.S. for thirty years—Byzantium Endures, the first of the Pyat Quartet, is not a book for the faint-hearted. It’s the story of a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer, and obsessive antisemite whose epic journey from Leningrad to London connects him with scoundrels and heroes from Trotsky to Makhno, and whose career echoes that of the 20th century’s descent into Fascism and total war.
This is Moorcock at his audacious, iconoclastic best: a grand sweeping overview of the events of the last century, as revealed in the secret journals of modern literature’s most proudly unredeemable outlaw. This authoritative U.S. edition presents the author’s final cut, restoring previously forbidden passages and deleted scenes.
“What is extraordinary about this novel… is the largeness of the design. Moorcock has the bravura of a nineteeth-century novelist: he takes risks, he uses fiction as if it were a divining rod for the age’s most significant concerns. Here, in Byzantium Endures, he has taken possession of the early twentieth century, of a strange, dead civilization and recast them in a form which is highly charged without ceasing to be credible.”
—Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times
“A tour de force, and an extraordinary one. Mr. Moorcock has created in Pyatnitski a wholly sympathetic and highly complicated rogue… There is much vigorous action here, along with a depth and an intellectuality, and humor and color and wit as well.”
—The New Yorker
The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet
> Michael Moorcock with an introduction by Alan Wall
ISBN: 978-1-60486-492-2
448 pages
Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, that charming but despicable mythomaniac who first appeared in Byzantium Endures, is back. Having fled Bolshevik Russia in late 1919, Pyat’s progress is a series of leaps from crisis to crisis, as he begins affairs with a Baroness and a Greek prostitute while undertaking schemes to build flying machines in Europe and the United States. His devotion to flamboyantly racist, particularly antisemitic doctrines—like his devotion to cocaine—remains unabated, and he both sings the praises of Mussolini and lectures across America for the Ku Klux Klan. (His best kept secret is, of course, the fact that he is Jewish.) As the novel ends, Pyat is in Hollywood—his new Byzantium—hobnobbing with movie stars and dreaming of making films like those of his hero, D.W. Griffith.
Engineer, braggart, addict, Pyat is a magnificent invention, a genius of innocent vituperation: his finest achievement (and that of the author) is that his own warped and deluded vision is powerful enough to redefine reality. This authoritative edition presents this work in paperback for the first time in the U.S., along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.
“Michael Moorcock is an absolute wizard of a storyteller. I can think of no writer like him, not here, not in America. He is a wonder… it is marvelous to meet a novelist who has the energy for the epic. It is not simply a case of energy, Mr. Moorcock is also a storyteller, an old-fashioned button-holing, nineteenth-century storyteller.”
—Stanley Reynolds, Punch
“This is a rich, ambitious and erudite book…. If one purpose of fiction is to lead us into different worlds and, as Virginia Woolf says, to make of them ‘some kind of whole,’ then Michael Moorcock succeeds brilliantly.”
—Carolyn Slaughter, The Guardian
Jerusalem Commands: The Third Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet
Michael Moorcock with an introduction by Alan Wall
ISBN: 978-1-60486-493-9
448 pages
“I will admit that I lost my way a little in the Twenties and Thirties, and I blame no one for what happened then, least of all myself.”
Unmistakably, this is the voice of Colonel Pyat, addict, inventor, and bizarre Everyman for the twentieth century. In Jerusalem Commands, the third of the Pyat quartet, our hero schemes and fantasizes his way from New York to Hollywood, from Cairo to Marrakesh, from cult success to the utter limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage in his wake as he crashes towards an inevitable appointment with the worst nightmare this century has to offer.
It is Michael Moorcock’s extraordinary achievement to convert the life of Maxim Pyatnitski into epic and often hilariously comic adventure. Sustained by his dreams and profligate inventions, his determination to turn his back on the realities of his own origins, Pyat runs from crisis to crisis, every ruse a further link in a vast chain of deceit, suppression, betrayal. Yet, in his deranged self-deception, his monumentally distorted vision, this thoroughly unreliable narrator becomes a lens for focusing, through the dimensions of wild farce and chilling terror, on an uneasy brand of truth.
“Ostensibly, Pyat’s voyages from California to Casablanca and Cairo are those of any picaresque hero, plunging into adventure, danger and miraculous escape, without any purpose except the next step of the journey. But it is also a journey through the prejudices of the 1920s, from the subliminal racism of the British empire and the suppressed antisemitism of Hollywood to the dawning supermanship of fascism.”
—Andro Linklater, Sunday Times (UK)
The Vengeance of Rome: The Fourth Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet
Michael Moorcock with an introduction by Alan Wall
ISBN: 978-1-60486-494-6
500 pages
The quartet is complete as Pyat keeps his appointment with the age’s worst nightmare. Bisexual, cocaine-loving engineer/inventor/spy, he enthusiastically embraces Fascism. Hero-worshipping Mussolini, he enters the dictator’s circle, enjoys a close friendship with Mussolini’s wife and is sent by the Duce on a secret mission to Munich, becoming intimate with Ernst Röhm, the homosexual stormtrooper leader. Pyat’s extraordinary luck leaves him after he witnesses Hitler’s massacre of Röhm and the SA. At last he is swallowed up in a Dachau concentration camp. Thirty years later, having survived the Spanish Civil War, he is living in Portobello Road and telling his tale to a writer called Moorcock.
This authoritative edition presents this work for the first time in the United States, along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.
“The Vengeance of Rome comes along to remind us of what we have been missing: the dynamism of a nineteenth-century master operating with all of the darts and shuffles of our electronic, amnesiac, fast-twitch culture.”
—Iain Sinclair, The Spectator
“Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy flux itself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things. Posterity will certainly give him that due place in the English literature of the late twentieth century which his more anaemic contemporaries grudge; indeed he is so prolific it will probably look as though he has written most of it anyway.”
—Angela Carter, Guardian
“A wonderfully vivid evocation of Europe in its darkest hour.”
—Mail on Sunday
Damnificados
JJ Amaworo Wilson
ISBN: 978-1-62963-117-2
288 pages
Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, six hundred “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.”
Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse. The ghosts and miracles woven into the narrative are part of a richly imagined world in which the laws of nature are constantly stretched and the past is always present.
“Should be read by every politician and rich bastard and then force-fed to them—literally, page by page.”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Place to Stand
“Two-headed beasts, biblical floods, dragonflies to the rescue—magical realism threads through this authentic and compelling struggle of men and women—the damnificados—to make a home for themselves against all odds. Into this modern, urban, politically familiar landscape of the ‘have-nots’ versus the ‘haves,’ Amaworo Wilson introduces archetypes of hope and redemption that are also deeply familiar—true love, vision quests, the hero’s journey, even the remote possibility of a happy ending. These characters, this place, this dream will stay with you long after you’ve put this book down.”
—Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger
Jewish Noir
Edited by Kenneth Wishnia
ISBN: 978-1-62963-111-0
432 pages
Jewish Noir is a unique collection of new stories by Jewish and non-Jewish literary and genre writers, including numerous award-winning authors such as Marge Piercy, Harlan Ellison, S.J. Rozan, Nancy Richler, Moe Prager, Wendy Hornsby, Charles Ardai, and Kenneth Wishnia. The stories explore such issues as the Holocaust and its long-term effects on subsequent generations, anti-Semitism in the mid– and late-twentieth-century United States, and the dark side of the Diaspora (the decline of revolutionary fervor, the passing of generations, the Golden Ghetto, etc.). The stories in this collection also include many “teachable mo
ments” about the history of prejudice, and the contradictions of ethnic identity and assimilation into American society.
Stories include:
“A Simkhe” (A Celebration), first published in Yiddish in the Forverts in 1912 by one of the great unsung writers of that era, Yente Serdatsky. This story depicts the disillusionment that sets in among a group of Russian Jewish immigrant radicals after several years in the United States. This is the story’s first appearance in English.
“Trajectories,” Marge Piercy’s story of the divergent paths taken by two young men from the slums of Cleveland and Detroit in a rapidly changing post-World War II society.
“Some You Lose,” Nancy Richler’s empathetic exploration of the emotional and psychological challenges of trying to sum up a man’s life in a eulogy.
“Her Daughter’s Bat Mitzvah,” Rabbi Adam Fisher’s darkly comic profanity-filled monologue in the tradition of Sholem Aleichem, the writer best known as the source material for Fiddler on the Roof (minus the profanity, that is).
“Flowers of Shanghai,” S.J. Rozan’s compelling tale of hope and despair set in the European refugee community of Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II.
“Yahrzeit Candle,” Stephen Jay Schwartz’s take on the subtle horrors of the inevitable passing of time.
Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology
Edited by Ann VanderMeer and Je VanderMeer
ISBN: 978-1-62963-035-9
352 pages
Sisters of the Revolution gathers a highly curated selection of feminist speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more) chosen by one of the most respected editorial teams in speculative literature today, the award-winning Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas.