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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
I-5
Summer BrennerISBN: 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
The Chieu Hoi Saloon
Michael Harris
ISBN: 978-1-60486-112-9
320 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
Fire on the Mountain
Terry Bisson
with an Introduction by
Mumia Abu-Jamal
ISBN: 978-1-60486-087-0 208
pages $15.95
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 winne
r 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, death row prisoner and author of Live From Death Row, from the Introduction.
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
Lonely Hearts Killer
Tomoyuki Hoshino
ISBN: 978-1-60486-084-9
288 pages $15.95
What happens when a popular and young emperor suddenly dies, and the only person available to succeed him is his sister? How can people in an island country survive as climate change and martial law are eroding more and more opportunities for local sustainability and mutual aid? And what can be done to challenge the rise of a new authoritarian political leadership at a time when the general public is obsessed with fears related to personal and national “security"? These and other provocative questions provide the backdrop for this powerhouse novel about young adults embroiled in what appear to be more private matters – friendships, sex, a love suicide, and struggles to cope with grief and work.
PM Press is proud to bring you this first English translation of a full-length novel by the award-winning author Tomoyuki Hoshino.
“A major novel by Tomoyuki Hoshino, one of the most compelling and challenging writers in Japan today, Lonely Hearts Killer deftly weaves a path between geopolitical events and individual experience, forcing a personal confrontation with the political brutality of the postmodern era. Adrienne Hurley’s brilliant translation captures the nuance and wit of Hoshino’s exploration of depths that rise to the surface in the violent acts of contemporary youth.” — Thomas LaMarre, William Dawson Professor of East Asian Studies, McGill University
“Since his debut, Hoshino has used as the core of his writing a unique sense of the unreality of things, allowing him to illuminate otherwise hidden realities within Japanese society. And as he continues to write from this tricky position, it goes without saying that he produces work upon work of extraordinary beauty and power.” — Yuko Tsushima, award-winning Japanese novelist
“Reading Hoshino’s novels is like traveling to a strange land all by yourself. You touch down on an airfield in a foreign country, get your passport stamped, and leave the airport all nerves and anticipation. The area around an airport is more or less the same in any country. It is sterile and without character. There, you have no real sense of having come somewhere new. But then you take a deep breath and a smell you’ve never encountered enters your nose, a wind you’ve never felt brushes against your skin, and an unknown substance rains down upon your head.” — Mitsuyo Kakuta, award-winning Japanese novelist
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
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