The Football Factory
Page 33
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.
Futures
John Barker
ISBN: 978-1-60486-961-3
384 pages
Carol is a small-time cocaine dealer in 1987 London. She’s on her own with a young daughter, a good mother who is especially careful in her working life. For some punters, this involves being Simone. One of these customers is Phil, a financial analyst in the City who, with his longtime pal and fellow analyst Jack, fantasizes a cocaine futures market while on a coke binge. They look at it as they would look at any other commodity.
At the top of the wholesale business are Gordon Murray and his brothers, who have an “in” with the Drug Squad and are prepared to shop anyone to keep it that way, on top of the violence they use as and when needed.
When the cocaine futures market becomes a reality, Carol has an opportunity to go for the big deal that could get her out of the business altogether. Meanwhile, a stock market crash creates havoc, and a once-in-a lifetime hurricane sweeps across London, ripping down trees and the communication systems of the stock market itself. Carol must make her choice, as three very different worlds are about to collide.
“In Futures, John Barker has produced a fast-paced, hard-boiled novel that pulls you back, effortlessly, into morally corrupt Thatcherite London. Barker’s crisp, laconic, prose, eye-for-detail storytelling, command of the art of narrative, and his ear for fluid and convincing dialogue makes him, in my view, Hackney’s worthy successor to Tom Wolfe.”
—Stuart Christie, author of Granny Made Me an Anarchist
“John Barker’s prose is so downbeat he leaves even the most gritty of crime novelists looking like they’re aiming for the preteen market. But if you want to get beyond the fairy tale version of the sordid underbelly of life, then you gotta check Futures out.”
—Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
Men in Prison
Victor Serge Introduction and Translation by Richard Greeman
ISBN: 978-1-60486-736-7
232 pages
“Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison. “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.”
The author of Men in Prison served five years in French penitentiaries (1912–1917) for the crime of “criminal association”—in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous “Tragic Bandits” of French anarchism. “While I was still in prison,” Serge later recalled, “fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all … There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine, prison, is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.”
Ironically, Serge returned to writing upon his release from a GPU prison in Soviet Russia, where he was arrested as an anti-Stalinist subversive in 1928. He completed Men in Prison (and two other novels) in “semi-captivity” before he was rearrested and deported to the Gulag in 1933. Serge’s classic prison novel has been compared to Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Koestler’s Spanish Testament, Genet’s Miracle of the Rose, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch both for its authenticity and its artistic achievement.
This edition features a substantial new introduction by translator Richard Greeman, situating the work in Serge’s life and times.
“No purer book about the hell of prison has ever been written.”
—Martin Seymour-Smith, Scotsman
Pike
Benjamin Whitmer
ISBN: 978-1-60486-089-4
224 pages
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