Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!
Page 40
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
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
Rick Dakan
ISBN: 978-1-60486-088-7
272 pages $17.95
What do you call 1000 hackers assembled into one hotel for the weekend? A menace to society? Trouble waiting to happen? They call it a computer security conference, or really, a Hacker Con. A place for hackers, security experts, penetration testers, and tech geeks of all stripes to gather and discuss the latest hack, exploits, and gossip. For Paul, Chloe, and their Crew of con artist vigilantes, it’s the perfect hunting ground for their most ambitious plans yet.
After a year of undercover recruiting at hacker cons all over the country, Chloe and Paul have assembled a new Crew of elite hackers, driven anarchist activists, and seductive impersonators. Under the cover of one of the Washington DC’s biggest and most prestigious hacker events, they’re going up against power house lobbyists, black hat hackers, and even the U.S. Congress in order to take down their most challenging, and most deserving target yet. The stakes have never been higher for them, and who knows if their new recruits are up to the immense challenge of undermining “homeland security” for the greater good.
Inspired by years of author Rick Dakan’s research in the hacker community, Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues opens a new, self-contained chapter in the techno-thriller series.
“Filled with charming geek humor, thoroughly likable characters, and a relentless plot … ” — Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing, on the Geek Mafia books”
“A first rate example of geek fiction getting it right. Black Hat Blues gives new meaning to the term ‘hacker con’—you won’t want to put it down.” — Heidi Potter, Shmoocon organizer
“Rick Dakan is one of the few fiction authors working today who tries to understand hacker culture not as a sideshow or scare tactic, but as a way of living a life. His words ring with honest research.” — Jason Scott, director of BBS: The Documentary
The Lucky Strike
Kim Stanley Robinson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-085-6
128 pages $12.00
Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson is known as not only the most literary but also the most progressive (read “radical”) of today’s top rank SF authors. His bestselling Mars Trilogy tells the epic story of the future colonization of the red planet, and the revolution that inevitably follows. The Years of Rice and Salt is based on a devastatingly simple idea: If the medieval plague had wiped out all of Europe, what woul
d our world look like today? His latest novel, Galileo’s Dream, is a stunning combination of historical drama and far-flung space opera, in which the ten dimensions of the universe itself are rewoven to ensnare history’s most notorious torturers.
The Lucky Strike, the classic and controversial story Robinson has chosen for PM’s new Outspoken Authors series, begins on a lonely Pacific island, where a crew of untested men are about to take off in an untried aircraft with a deadly payload that will change our world forever. Until something goes wonderfully wrong …
Plus: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, in which Robinson dramatically deconstructs “alternate history” to explore what might have been if things had gone differently over Hiroshima that day. As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred and all-bets off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author. Surprises are promised.
“The foremost writer of literary utopias.” — Time
“The best nature writer in the U.S. today also happens to write science fiction.” — The Ends of the Earth
“It’s no coincidence that one of our most visionary science fiction writers is also a profoundly good nature writer.” — Los Angeles Times
“If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson.” — The New York Times
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 $22.00
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 anti-Semite 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
“Clearly the foundation on which a gigantic literary edifice will, in due course, be erected. While others build fictional molehills, Mr. Moorcock makes plans for great shimmering pyramids. But the footings of this particular edifice are intriguing and audacious enough to leave one hungry for more.” — John Naughton, Listener