Mendicant Bookworks: 14 books

The practices and prejudices a of small Indiana town are laid bare in "Joe's Smoke & News", literary short fiction by small press stalwart Doug Draime. What begins, for narrator Danny Durrell, as a shiftless, adolescent utopia, soon becomes a quiet rumination on the vast human cost of...

Alex Kudera's Turquoise Truck gives us a down-on-his-luck car salesman working for a predatory dealership, and how the automobiles they pawn off on unsuspecting customers reveal the stark and ugly consequences of our kill-or-be-killed economic culture. It's a peep through the keyhole of...

Unsure of what to expect, Little Pay attends his first father-son fishing trip, one filled with the unhinged joys and quiet vulnerabilities of fathers and sons, and boys becoming men. Echoes of the best of Raymond Carver, "Midnight Baseball" is nostalgic without being obvious -- delivering...

Professor Jimmy Abbey weighs decorum and desire as he dreams of conquest both with a hotel maid, and Circe -- the conference's hot, young "it" girl. Is Jimmy truly any different than his competing cohorts? Will he ever get his chance to get Circe alone? Or will the emotional baggage of potential...

Jay McInerney meets Woody Allen -- with enough pop culture to orbit Tarantino. Told in 2nd person, Tanzer brings us along as a love-struck everyman trying to convince both the world and this girl, at any cost, that he -- and not her boss -- is the guy for her. Will she wake up, or must he become the...

Told almost entirely in one-sided conversation, THE GRAVEYARD chronicles the drinking and working lives of the doomed. Our silent narrator hears-tell of Wimpy (the hero we never meet) from a regular who is getting pickled before a long night's driving)--and just how tough all the the poor bastards...

One hungover morning Johnny crawls from the wreckage of a ruined relationship and hits the streets of Hull. But after he lands in the back of a police van with a man who looks exactly like him, it seems fate has dealt him more than he expected as he finds himself part of The Line Up. About...

Slightly hung over and skipping work, Oscar meets Star, and is instantly smitten. The unlikely pair share an afternoon "date" of food, drink, and conversation in San Francisco's Tenderloin district finding out which of them is The Strange One.About the Author:William Taylor Jr lives and...

Hoping to keep his woman happy, Max Zajack has scrounged up grunt work for another laughable paycheck, forced once again to plumb the depths of The Artistic Life and this time Max is convinced he's hit rock-bottom. How can he be so sure? Because he's working on a Hollywood production... About...

Built in the quiet moments between pitch-perfect dialogue, Something That's True is existential humanism played out in miniature. The blue-collar strip clubs and grease-pits of a Smalltown, USA serve as the backdrop for this yarn of quiet love and betrayal, wherein the truth really can set you free. About...

In "New Carpet," Cunningham gives us the portrait of a struggling young couple on the hunt for an affordable place to live. A cheery handyman shows them a vacant, ramshackle duplex with a tragic past. Filled with heartbreak and quiet perseverance, it's an atmospheric meditation on cruel...

Call it a confession of poems about a son and a father, and collected into it the us that a father and son are. This series is an admission of poetry, and honesty about fathers and sons, how we hold hands and are willingly lost. When We is ultimately about letting go, and that is our irony: that which...

During his years in the majors, Floyd Patterson had pitched for everyone from Oakland, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and even been a Marlin. Now he was an Anchorage Lumberjack, and no one, maybe not even Patterson himself, had any idea what the hell he was doing toeing the rubber in Alaska's Moose League....

Sick of battling mosquitoes, the curiously-named Zen-vagabond Ridgwell signs on with a luxurious yacht bound for Guyana. Once aboard, he learns the hard way that offers too good to be true usually are. About the Author: Raised in the East End of London, Ridgwell (the writer) has lived in Cuba, Mexico,...