LIVE! From City Lights

On January 27th, 2014, Nick Turse and Oscar Villalon discussed Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Picador Books) at City Lights Bookstore! Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by “a few bad apples.” But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to “kill anything that moves.” Drawing on more than a decade of research in secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time how official policies resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. In shocking detail, he lays out the workings of a military machine that made crimes in almost every major American combat unit all but inevitable. Kill Anything That Moves takes us from archives filled with Washington’s long-suppressed war crime investigations to the rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to bloodthirsty campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which a general obsessed with body counts led soldiers to commit what one participant called “a My Lai a month.” Thousands of Vietnam books later, Kill Anything That Moves, devastating and definitive, finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts Americans to this day. Nick Turse is an award-winning journalist, historian, essayist, the managing editor of TomDispatch.com, the co-founder of Dispatch Books, and a fellow at the Nation Institute. He is the author of numerous books including The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyber Warfare (Dispatch Books/Haymarket Books, 2012) and The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008). He is also the editor of The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso, 2010). Turse has written for The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Adbusters, GOOD magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, In These Times, Mother Jones and The Village Voice, among other print and on-line publications.  His articles have also appeared in such newspapers as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The Contra-Costa Times, The Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Hartford Courant, The Indianapolis Star, The Knoxville News Sentinel, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Tampa Tribune, among others. He was the recipient of a Ridenhour Prize at the National Press Club in April 2009 for his years-long investigation of mass civilian slaughter by U.S. troops in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta during Operation Speedy Express.  In his article for The Nation, “A My Lai a Month,” he also exposed a Pentagon-level cover-up of these crimes that was abetted by a major news magazine.  In 2009, he also received a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College and a MOLLY National Journalism Prize honorable mention for the same article. Oscar Villallon is the Managing Editor of Zyzzyva Journal and is the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Literary Section. What has been said about Kill Anything That Moves “A tour de force of reporting and research: the first time comprehensive portrait, written with dignity and skill, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings, hidden behind a screen of official lies and cover-ups all these years, are shocking almost beyond words.… Some thirty thousand books have been written about the Vietnam War. Many more will now be needed, and they must begin with Kill Anything That Moves.” —Jonathan Schell, [...]

From one of the most innovative and vital writers of his generation, an extraordinary collection of stories that showcases his gifts—and his range—as never before. In the hilarious, lacerating “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide. As the collection progresses, we move from more traditional narratives into the experimental work that has made Ben Marcus a groundbreaking master of the short form. In these otherworldly landscapes, characters resort to extreme survival strategies to navigate the terrors of adulthood, one opting to live in a lightless cave and another methodically setting out to recover total childhood innocence; an automaton discovers love and has to reinvent language to accommodate it; filial loyalty is seen as a dangerous weakness that must be drilled away; and the distance from a cubicle to the office coffee cart is refigured as an existential wasteland, requiring heroic effort. In these piercing, brilliantly observed investigations into human vulnerability and failure, it is often the most absurd and alien predicaments that capture the deepest truths. Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.

Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for “safe space” have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence was published by Duke University Press Christina B. Hanhardt is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

An Evening with Robert Jensen, Arguing for Our Lives We live in a time when public discourse is more skewed than ever by the propaganda that big money can buy, with trust in the leadership of elected officials at an all-time low. The “news” has degenerated into sensationalist sound bites, and the idea of debate has become a polarized shouting-match that precludes any meaningful discussion. It’s also a time of anxiety, as we’re faced with economic and ecological crises on a global scale, with stakes that seem higher than ever before. In times like these, it’s essential that we be able to think and communicate clearly. In this lively primer on critical thinking, Robert Jensen attacks the problems head-on and delivers an accessible and engaging book that explains how we can work collectively to enrich our intellectual lives. Drawing on more than two decades of classroom experience and community organizing, Jensen shares strategies on how to challenge “conventional wisdom” in order to courageously confront the crises of our times, and offers a framework for channeling our fears and frustrations into productive analysis that can inform constructive action. Jensen connects abstract ideas with the everyday political and spiritual struggles of ordinary people. Free of either academic or political jargon, this book is for anyone struggling to understand our world and contribute to making it a better place.

Alli Warren’s  Here Come the Warm Jets is the latest release in the City Lights Spotlight Series with a Special Appearance by Spotlight Poetry Editor Garrett Caples reading from his new chapbook, Invisible Sleep Charged with swagger and sensuality, tenderness and cold fact, the 10th Spotlight series installment, Here Come the Warm Jets, is the brash debut volume by Bay Area poet Alli Warren. Taking its title from the Brian Eno classic, Jets jumbles gender, class, and space-time perspectives into a chorus of contemporary idioms and lyrical longings. Against the daunting backdrop of contemporary political-economy, Warren launches her missives of desire, in writing that is at once raw and sly. From the Bishop of Worms to Flipper to E-40, nobody’s safe from the easy virtuosity with which she makes language sing.

reading from The Roy Stories from Seven Stories Press For forty years—a Biblical time span—The Roy Stories has been the one continuous unbroken line in the otherwise kaleidoscopic career of one of America’s greatest living writers. Collected here for the first time, the Roy stories of Barry Gifford chronicle his personal history of a time—roughly, the late 1940s through the early 1960s—and a place—the southern and mid-western United States (Chicago, Illinois, and Key West and Miami, Florida, in particular). Similar in structure and tone to Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Barry Gifford’s slices of life cut to the heart and the bone. “Nearly every Gifford story opens a Pandora’s box of uncontainable emotions,” wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe. “There’s no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him.” Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages. His most recent prose works are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, and Memories from a Sinking Ship: A Novel. His previous most recent poetry collection is Las cuatro reinas / The Four Queens, released in 2006. Gifford lives in the San Francisco area and maintains a website at www.barrygifford.com

  Katherine Silver and Scott Esposito read and discuss the work of Marcos Giralt Torrente on the occasion of the release of The End Of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente translated by Katherine Silver published by McSweeney’s Books In this quartet of mesmerizing stories, Marcos Giralt Torrente explores the confounding, double-edged promise of love. Each finds a man carefully churning over his past, trying to fathom how the distance between people can become suddenly unbridgeable. Two tourists visit a remote island off the coast of Africa and are undone by a disconcerting encounter with another couple. A young man, enchanted by his bohemian cousin and her husband, watches them fall into a state of resentful dependence over the course of decades. A chaste but all-consuming love affair between a troubled boy and a wealthy but equally troubled girl leaves a scar that never heals. The son of divorced parents tries in vain to reunite them before realizing why he is wrong to do so. In The End of Love, Giralt Torrente forges discomfiting and gripping dramas from the small but consequential misunderstandings that shape our lives. Marcos Giralt Torrente was born in Madrid in 1968 and is the author of three novels, a novella, and a book of short stories. He was writer-in-residence at the Spanish Academy in Rome, the Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, and the University of Aberdeen, and was part of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme in 2002-2003. He is the recipient of several distinguished awards, most importantly the Spanish National Book Award in 2011. His works have been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean and Portuguese. The End of Love is his first book to appear in English. Katherine Silver’s most recent translations of contemporary literature in Spanish include works by Daniel Sada, César Aira, and Horacio Castellanos Moya. She is also the codirector of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Scott Esposito’s criticism has appeared in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The National, The Point, Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, and numerous others. He has also written introductions to novels for the Dalkey Archive Press and Melville House Publishing. He is the editor of online publications for San Francisco’s Center for the Art of Translation and has been a consultant on translated literature for presses including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McSweeney’s, Graywolf, and Open Letter. He is also the editor in chief for The Quarterly Conversation, an online periodical of book reviews and essays. He is the co-author with Lauren Elkin of The End Of Oulipo? from Zero Books.

celebrating the release of How to Read a Novelist by John Freeman from Farrar, Strauss, Giroux If you love novels, then this book is for you. For the last fifteen years, whenever a novel was published, John Freeman was there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers worldwide, the onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the current editor of Granta, he has reviewed thousands of books and interviewed scores of writers. In How to Read a Novelist, which pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, he shares with us what he’s learned. From such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, and Mo Yan, to established American lions such as Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, to the new guard of Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and more, Freeman has talked to everyone. What emerges is an instructive and illuminating, definitive yet still idiosyncratic guide to a diverse and lively literary culture: a vision of the novel as a varied yet vital contemporary form, a portrait of the novelist as a unique and profound figure in our fragmenting global culture, and a book that will be essential reading for every aspiring writer and engaged reader—a perfect companion (or gift!) for anyone who’s ever curled up with a novel and wanted to know a bit more about the person who made it possible.   John Freeman is an award-winning writer and book critic who has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. Freeman won the 2007 James Patterson Pageturner Award for his work as the president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is the former editor-in-chief of Granta and lives in New York City. Robin Sloan is a writer and a media inventor who lives in San Francisco. He has worked at Twitter and has acted as a consultant to numerous technology firms. He is the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore published by FSG.

celebrating the release of A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture by Alexander Cockburn Daisy Cockburn (daughter of the late political commentator Alexander Cockburn) and Counterpunch cofounder Jeffrey St. Clair pay tribute to one of the most influential journalists of our time. Alexander Cockburn’s writing stems from the best tradition of Mark Twain, H.L. Menchken and Tom Paine. Colossal Wreck, his final work, finished shortly before his death in July 2012, exemplifies the prodigious literary brio that made Cockburn’s name. Whether ruthlessly exposing Beltway hypocrisy, pricking the pomposity of those in power, or tirelessly defending the rights of the oppressed, Cockburn never pulled his punches and always landed a blow where it mattered. In this panoramic work, covering nearly two decades of American culture and politics, he explores subjects as varied as the sex life of Bill Clinton and the best way to cook wild turkey. He stands up for the rights of prisoners on death row and exposes the chicanery of the media and the duplicity of the political elite. As he pursues a serpentine path through the nation, he charts the fortunes of friends, famous relatives, and sworn enemies alike to hilarious effect. This is a thrilling trip through the reefs and shoals of politics and everyday life. Combining a passion for the places, the food and the people he encountered on dozens of cross-country journeys, Cockburn reports back over seventeen years of tumultuous change among what he affectionately called the “thousand landscapes” of the United States. visit: http://www.counterpunch.org/

Editor of the City Lights/Spotlight Poetry series Garrett Caples interviewed poet Alli Warren before she embarked on her October East Coast tour. Back in the Bay Area, Alli Warren reads Thursday, Dec. 5th at the Poetry Center in San Francisco. They discussed Here Come the Warm Jets, Warren’s first full-length book, what it’s like to have a debut book out with City Lights, and why Warren chose the Brian Eno reference for her title. “Warren’s first book of poems is highly self-reflective, interestingly interrogative, and a lot of fun.”—Booklist “Without a doubt, she is one of the best young writers in the Bay Area.”—SF Weekly   Charged with swagger and sensuality, tenderness and cold fact, the 10th Spotlight series installment, Here Come the Warm Jets, is the brash debut volume by Bay Area poet Alli Warren. Taking its title from the Brian Eno classic, Jets jumbles gender, class, and space-time perspectives into a chorus of contemporary idioms and lyrical longings. Against the daunting backdrop of contemporary political-economy, Warren launches her missives of desire, in writing that is at once raw and sly. From the Bishop of Worms to Flipper to E-40, nobody’s safe from the easy virtuosity with which she makes language sing.

An Army of Lovers begins with the story of two poets, Demented Panda and Koki, united in their desire to write politically engaged poetry at a time when poetry seems to have lost its ability to effect social change. Their first project is more than a failure, resulting in a spell that unleashes a torrent of raw sewage and surrealistic embodiments of consumerist excess and black site torture techniques. Subsequent chapters feature an experimental composer (Koki?) and a performance artist (Panda?) whose bodies are literally invaded with the ills of capitalism, manifested through leaking blisters and other maladies, as well as a radical remix of a Raymond Carver story, questioning “What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry.” The novel concludes with Panda and Koki returning to the site of their failed collaboration to conjure up a more utopian vision of “an army of lovers.” Fantastical, lyrical, whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as serious as it is absurd.

Adam Mansbach Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 7:00 P.M., City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco celebrating the release of Rage Is Back published by Viking Kilroy Dondi Vance is an eighteen-year-old mixed-race Brooklynite who deals pot and goes to prep school on scholarship, all while growing up in the shadow of his absentee father, Billy Rage, a legendary graffiti writer who disappeared from New York City in 1989 following a public feud with MTA police chief Anastacio Bracken. Now it’s 2005. Bracken is running for mayor of New York City. And who should Dondi discover on a rooftop in Brooklyn but his father, newly returned to the city and ready to settle the score. The return of Rage and the mayoral race of Bracken prompt a reunion of every graffiti writer who mattered in the 1980s—in order to thwart Bracken with the greatest graffiti stunt New York City has ever seen. Rage Is Back delivers a mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes and villains. Moving through the city’s unseen communities, from the tunnel camps of the Mole People to the drug dens of Crown Heights, Rage Is Back is many things: a dramatic, hilarious thrill ride; a love letter to NYC that introduces the most powerful urban underdog narrator this side of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and a literary tour de force from a writer on the brink of real stardom. Adam Mansbach is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, GQ,  the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He is the author of Angry Black White Boy, The End Of The Jews, Shackling Water, and the New York Times Bestseller Go The Fuck To Sleep.  He lives in Berkeley, California. Visit:  www.adammansbach.com

On Sunday, November 11, 2012, City Lights celebrated the release of  Everything Indicates: Bay Bridge Poems & Portraits (Words Pictures Ideas) with the editors of the piece: Tamsin Smith, Elissa G. Perry, and Ben Davis. A statement from the editors: A poem – like a bridge – connects us. These strange and beautiful testaments to human imagination, will, and shared purpose, exist as soaring reminders that we are not alone. Too often, however, we forget to look and listen. In the course of our busy hours, we travel through frustration and drudgery, stopping to look neither within nor beyond ourselves. This collection is an invitation to connect. On a bright April day in 2011, local poets took an all-access tour of the new Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge. As we marveled at the collective feat of engineering prowess, creativity, and sheer human strength, verses sprung forth. These inspired poems are as diverse as the individuals and communities that this bridge links together. We hope that they move you. We hope that you share and return to them. We hope that you look at the innumerable bridges all around you – literal, metaphorical, and mortal – with a keener, more tender eye. And listen. There could be no more perfect accompaniment to the music of the verses than the imagery of Thomas Michael Alleman. His photographs distill and communicate a mysterious beauty that’s sometimes too much for the eyes to take in all on their own. With his lens, he makes visible the echo of our deepest senses. To this poet of pictures, we are most grateful. Tamsin Smith is a social entrepreneur and poetry evangelist. She is the president of a global consultancy SlipStreamStrategy.com and founder of OBene.com. As founding president, she helped Bono and Bobby Shriver create and build (RED), which has generated over $175 million to fight AIDS in Africa. She hosts a weekly poetry circle at an assisted living community in Santa Rosa, and blogs frequently on poetry, literature, philanthropy, and life at www.huffingtonpost.com/tamsin-smith. Tamsin helped organize the Poets’ Bridge Tour and co-edited this collection. Elissa G. Perry writer, artist, educator, agitator and geek— is of African and Choctaw descent. She has published several short stories, interviews, and other writings in numerous anthologys, journals, and magazines including Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds, I Do/I Don’t, Black Silk and others. She has been a finalist in Poets & Writers’ “California Voices” competition, a Voices Fellow at the Voices of Our Nations Foundation at the University of San Francisco, and is currently the recipient of an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission for her project Mission Drift. Elissa helped organize the Poets’ Bridge Tour and co-edited this collection. Ben Davis is a champion of activating the arts and creative community for the advancement of the civic good. In addition to helping bring this poetry book to life, he is spearheading The Bay Lights-a monumental fine-arts installation of 25,000 LEDs along the West Span of the Bay Bridge.

Stacey Lewis and Pen Translation Finalist Aron Aji discussed A Long Day’s Evening (City Lights Books) by Bilge Karasu on December 11, 2012.  When Leo III, Emperor of Byzantium outlaws all religious paintings and icons, Constantinople is thrown into crisis. A palace official overseeing the destruction of an image of Christ is murdered by a band of irate women, and an atmosphere of danger grips the city’s monasteries, strongholds of icon veneration. Living amidst unacknowledged stirrings of resistance, watching for cues from the other monks, Andronikos is deeply confused about his own beliefs, and fears the consequences of exposing himself. One night he decides to escape, leaving behind his beloved Ioakim, who must confront his own crisis of faith and choose where to place his allegiance. Against a backdrop of religious and political upheaval, the two experience their love as the absence that each becomes for the other. In language that builds to an operatic intensity, the dualities of dogma and faith, custom and law, truth and lies, individual and society, East and West, Byzantium and Rome, are embodied in a story of prohibited love and devotion to the Unseen. “From 8th century Constantinople to Istanbul in 1960, Karasu’s words travel the temporal distance like a flock of storks, flying to a horizon where history intersects with faith, religious and political, and where memory looks and finds meaning. Only a master can choreograph such a difficult journey . . . and Karasu is one. This is a fascinating novel and a pleasure to read.” — Sinan Antoon, author of I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody “It might seem odd to find such crafted postmodernist writing coming out of Turkey. [Karasu] is a rare find indeed. Fascinating … an illuminating transitional work between the work of Turkey’s romantic realist Yashar Kemal and contemporary postmodernist Orhan Pamuk. More please.” – Kirkus Reviews “One of Turkey’s most interesting modern writers.” – Booklist Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) was born in Istanbul. Often referred to as “the sage of Turkish literature,” during his lifetime he published collections of stories, novels, and two books of essay.  

Chris D Portrait by Mark Vallen Chris Desjardins came into City Lights Bookstore on November 28, 2012, to read from his exquisite new noir fiction pieces: Mother’s Worry and Shallow Water (A Southern Gothic Noir Western) (New Texture Books). about Mother’s Worry: The year is 1987, and outlaw Ray Diamond’s mother Lorna is the queenpin of a cesspool of crime and perversion in Mystic, Georgia. When Ray is discharged from the Navy in San Diego, he absconds with a .45, planning to rob and drug deal his wayeast to his hometown. But when Ray arrogantly knocks over a mob-connected El Paso liquor store, he doesn’t count on the owner’s psychotic son Eli dogging his trail, and his life corkscrews deep into nightmare. Back home in Mystic, Ray’s girl Connie Eustace resorts to stripping at Mama Lorna’s club to make ends meet. After witnessing a murder by the local sheriff, she goes on a drug and drink bender, finally agreeing to courier Lorna’s payoff to New Orleans crime lord Mr. Raindrop so she can flee until things cool down. Barely holding on until the long overdue Ray returns, Connie jumps from the frying pain into the fire. about Shallow Water: Post-Civil War, embittered Confederate veteran and sometime bounty hunter Santo Brady drifts from town to town in the rural Deep South. He reluctantly rescues half-breed Indian prostitute Lucy Damien from a backwater whistle stop only to have the whole world fall in on his head. They embark on a freight train-hopping odyssey to New Orleans, unaware that Lucy’s rich white father and psychotic brother from St. Louis are hot on their trail. Sidetracked by a band of sadistic train robbers, Lucy is kidnapped, and the wounded Santo goes on a harrowing mission to track her. Reminiscent of such classic period noirs as James M. Cain’s Past All Dishonor and Cornell Woolrich’s Waltz into Darkness, Chris D. delivers a tragic tall tale plunging headfirst into a wild heart of darkness. what has been said about Chris D.s work: “One sinister serpent of a story, an old Republic Pictures western serial scripted by James M. Cain and reimagined by Sam Peckinpah. I loved it. Dive in and wallow in Shallow Water.”   —Eddie Muller, author of Dark City Dames, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir and the novels The Distance and Shadow Boxer “It takes a sick mind to write a book as thoroughly warped as Mother’s Worry. How lucky we are that Chris D has turned his pathological impulses to creative, rather than destructive, endeavors. This novel is of a piece with Chris’ work in music, film, and poetry — a crazy dive into a universe populated largely by monsters — and is a classic update of the Gold Medal/Lion Library loser-noir tradition. Great work, man.”  – Byron Coly, writer for WIRE Magazine and co-author (with Thurston Moore) of NO WAVE: POST-PUNK. UNDERGROUND. NEW YORK. 1976-1980 “Mother’s Worry swaps midnight for high noon; Chris D. burns down the speakeasy and pool hall and drags the roman noir across the desert dirt beneath an unforgiving sun. This is my kind of crime novel.” – Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria Chris Desjardins is a writer, musician, and film historian. He is the author of the novels NO EVIL STAR and the collectionDRAGON WHEEL SPLENDOR and Other Love Stories of Violence and Dread, all from New Texture Books. His anthology A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE, a 500-page collection of short stories, excerpts from unpublished novels and scores of dream journal entries, as well as all of his poetry and song lyrics, was published in December 2009 from New Texture. His non-fiction OUTLAW MASTERS OF JAPANESE FILM was published by IB Tauris (distributed by Palgrave Macmillan in the USA) in 2005. He saw release of his first feature film as director I PASS FOR HUMAN, in 2004 (and its DVD release in 2006), and worked as a programmer at The American Cinematheque in Hollywood, [...]