John A Imani is a long-time revolutionary living and working in Los Angeles and is a member of the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities-Los Angeles (RAC-LA). Under the name of S John Daniels he has written and produced six plays and is the author of three novels.
Penny Mickelbury is the author of ten mystery novels in three successful series: The Carol Ann Gibson Mysteries, the Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mysteries, and the Philip Rodriguez Mysteries. Mickelbury’s short stories have been included in several anthologies and collections, among them Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction (Paula Woods, ed.), The Mysterious Naiad (Grier and Forrest, eds.), and Shades of Black: Original Mystery Fiction by African-American Writers (Eleanor Taylor Bland, ed.) The character in the story in this collection, “Murder … Then and Now,” Charles “Boxer” Gordon, so far lives only in short story form, but he’s feeling ready to step out—and into his own novel.
Michael Moorcock was born into the London blitz, came to maturity during the swinging sixties, editing New Worlds, spearheading the New Wave in SF, contributing regularly to the underground press. As a musician he was part of the Ladbroke Grove “peoples’ music” movement, performing free gigs with Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies and his own band The Deep Fix, the only bands respected by people like Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux and Gay Advert. He received a gold disc for Warrior on the Edge of Time and worked with Calvert and Eno on various albums. His new album with Martin Stone and Pete Pavli, Live from the Terminal Café, will appear from Spirits Burning Inc.
Like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sara Paretsky moved to the South Side of Chicago from eastern Kansas. Paretsky has published fourteen novels featuring her detective V.I. Warshawski, along with two other novels, a book of essays, and numerous short stories. Credited with helping change the image of women in the contemporary crime novel, Paretsky founded the advocacy group Sisters in Crime in 1986 and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Cartier Diamond Dagger, the MWA Grand Master and Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year.
Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer from Davis, California. His novels include the Mars trilogy, the Science in the Capital trilogy, the Three Californias trilogy, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Galileo’s Dream.
Luis J. Rodriguez is a poet, novelist, short-story writer, children’s book writer, nonfiction writer and essayist with fifteen published books, including the best-selling memoir Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. His latest memoir, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey of Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, is from Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster.
Michael Skeet is an award-winning Canadian writer and broadcaster. Born in Calgary, Alberta, he began writing for radio before finishing college. He has sold short stories in the science fiction, dark fantasy and horror fields in addition to extensive publishing credits as a film and music critic. A two-time winner of Canada’s Aurora Award for excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Skeet lives in Toronto with his wife, Lorna Toolis (the head of the internationally renowned Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, a reference collection of the Toronto Public Library and one of the world’s best SF libraries).
Paco Ignacio Taibo II is an eminent historian and professor, and a journalist and writer of worldwide renown. He has won many literary awards, among them three Dashiell Hammetts for his detective novels, a Planeta Award for best historical novel, and the Italian Bancarella Book of the Year Award for his biography of Che Guevara. His novel Calling All Heroes: A Manual For Taking Power has most recently been translated and published by PM Press. He resides in Mexico City.
Benjamin Whitmer was raised by back-to-the-landers in southern Ohio and upstate New York. He now lives with his wife and two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, blues bars, and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver. He has published fiction and nonfiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. Pike is his first novel, published as part of PM Press’s Switchblade imprint in 2010.
Kenneth Wishnia’s novels include 23 Shades of Black, an Edgar and Anthony Award finalist; Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year; and Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year. PM Press will be reprinting the complete series of these novels starting in the spring of 2012. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, Politics Noir, and elsewhere. His latest novel, The Fifth Servant, was an Indie Notable selection, won the Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO (Premio Ragazzi category), and was a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award (Macavity Awards). He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island. Website: www.kennethwishnia.com.
Tim Wohlforth’s The Pink Tarantula, a short story collection, was published in April 2011 by Perfect Crime Books. His thriller Harry, which deals with eco-terrorism and is set in the Northwest, came out in May 2010. Over seventy-five short stories have been published. These appeared in Hardcore Hardboiled (Kensington), MWA’s Death Do Us Part, (Little Brown), Plots With Guns (Dennis McMillan) and other anthologies. Two of his stories have made the “Distinguished Mystery Stories” list in Otto Penzler’s Best American Mystery series. He is a Pushcart Prize Nominee and received a Certificate of Excellence from the Dana Literary Society.
EDITORS’ BIOS
Raised in the desert southwest of Tucson, Arizona, Andrea Gibbons moved to Los Angeles at twenty-one to spend ten years organizing around land, development and immigration issues. Leaving L.A., she found a new world of energy, love and rage to pour into her writing, fiction and nonfiction. She is currently melding theory and practice at the London School of Economics, editing for PM Press and the journal City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, and fighting the good fight against the government cuts in South London.
Son of a mechanic and a librarian, Gary Phillips draws on his experiences ranging from labor organizer to delivering dog cages in writing his tales of chicanery and malfeasance. He has been nominated for a Shamus, and has won a Chester Himes and a Brody for his writing. Do visit his website at: www.gdphillips.com.
PM PRESS was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM Press co-conspirators have published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs, spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake.
We seek to create radical and stimulating fiction and non-fiction books, pamphlets, t-shirts, visual and audio materials to entertain, educate and inspire you. We aim to distribute these through every available channel with every available technology — whether that means you are seeing anarchist classics at our bookfair stalls; reading our latest vegan cookbook at the café; downloading geeky fiction e-books; or digging new music and timely videos from our website.
PM Press is always on the lookout for talented and skilled volunteers, artists, activists and writers to work with. If you have a great idea for a project or can contribute in some way, please get in touch.
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More from SWITCHBLADE
The Jook
Gary Phillips
ISBN: 978-1-60486-040-5
256 pages $15.95
Zelmont Raines has slid a long way since his ability to jook, to out maneuver his opponents on the field, made him a Super Bowl winning wide receiver, earning him lucrative endorsement deals and more than his share of female attention. But Zee hasn’t always been good at saying no, so a series of missteps involving drugs, a paternity suit or two, legal entanglements, shaky investments and recurring injuries have virtually sidelined his career.
That is until Los Angeles gets a new pro franchise, the Barons, and Zelmont has one last chance at the big time he dearly misses. Just as it seems he might be getting back in the flow, he’s enraptured by Wilma Wells, the leggy and brainy lawyer for the team—who has a ruthless game plan all her own. And it’s Zelmont who might get jooked.
“Phillips, author of the acclaimed Ivan Monk series, takes elements of Jim Thompson (the ending), black-exploitation flicks (the profanity-fueled dialogue), and Penthouse magazine (the sex is anatomically correct) to create an over-the-top violent caper in which there is no honor, no respect, no love, and plenty of money. Anyone who liked George Pelecanos’ King Suckerman is going to love this even-grittier take on many of the same themes.” — Wes Lukowsky, Booklist
“Enough gritty gossip, blistering action and trash talk to make real life L.A. seem comparatively wholesome.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Gary Phillips writes tough and gritty parables about life and death on the mean streets—a place where sometimes just surviving is a noble enough cause. His is a voice that should be heard and celebrated. It rings true once again in The Jook, a story where all of Phillips’ talents are on display.” — Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch books
1-5
Summer Brenner
ISBN: 978-1-60486-019-1
256 pages $15.95
A novel of crime, transport, and sex, I-5 tells the bleak and brutal story of Anya and her journey north from Los Angeles to Oakland on the interstate that bisects the Central Valley of California.
Anya is the victim of a deep deception. Someone has lied to her; and because of this lie, she is kept under lock and key, used by her employer to service men, and indebted for the privilege. In exchange, she lives in the United States and fantasizes on a future American freedom. Or as she remarks to a friend, “Would she rather be fucking a dog … or living like a dog?” In Anya’s world, it’s a reasonable question.
Much of I-5 transpires on the eponymous interstate. Anya travels with her “manager” and driver from Los Angeles to Oakland. It’s a macabre journey: a drop at Denny’s, a bad patch of fog, a visit to a “correctional facility,” a rendezvous with an organ grinder, and a dramatic entry across Oakland’s city limits.
“Insightful, innovative and riveting. After its lyrical beginning inside Anya’s head, I-5 shifts momentum into a rollicking gangsters-on-the-lam tale that is in turns blackly humorous, suspenseful, heartbreaking and always populated by intriguing characters. Anya is a wonderful, believable heroine, her tragic tale told from the inside out, without a shred of sentimental pity, which makes it all the stronger. A twisty, fast-paced ride you won’t soon forget.” — Denise Hamilton, author of the L.A.Times bestseller The Last Embrace.
“I’m in awe. I-5 moves so fast you can barely catch your breath. It’s as tough as tires, as real and nasty as road rage, and best of all, it careens at breakneck speed over as many twists and turns as you’ll find on The Grapevine. What a ride! I-5’s a hard-boiled standout.” — Julie Smith, editor of New Orleans Noir and author of the Skip Langdon and Talba Wallis crime novel series
“In I-5, Summer Brenner deals with the onerous and gruesome subject of sex trafficking calmly and forcefully, making the reader feel the pain of its victims. The trick to forging a successful narrative is always in the details, and I-5 provides them in abundance. This book bleeds truth — after you finish it, the blood will be on your hands.” — Barry Gifford, author, poet and screenwriter
Pike
Benjamin Whitmer
ISBN: 978-1-60486-089-4
224 pages $15.95
Douglas Pike is no longer the murderous hustler he was in his youth, but reforming hasn’t made him much kinder. He’s just living out his life in his Appalachian hometown, working odd jobs with his partner, Rory, hemming in his demons the best he can. And his best seems just good enough until his estranged daughter overdoses and he takes in his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Wendy.
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
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 39