Pleasure Boat: 33 books

The Lord God Bird is a startling novella filled with dark images of America in the South in 1949. Jake Hamrick, a 19-year-old who has been obsessed since childhood with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a bird that is on the verge of extinction, leaves Illinois for Louisiana to find the creature,in this cinematic novella of obsession, passion, violence, love and loss that you won't forget.

This coming-of-age work draws the reader into 1940s back-country Arizona as well as urban Los Angeles, both from the viewpoint of twelve-year-old Tom Hall. Tom is searching for meaning in a lonely and transient time in his life, time spent skipping school, exploring the streets, raising hell at the...

In his 3rd collection of short fiction, Louis Phillips, a widely read author of fiction, poetry, drama, and children s stories, takes us into numerous strange worlds. From the opening story, Errata, which lists dozens of strange mistakes with a previously published story, to the final piece, Lee Harvey...

Chigger looked through the shrubbery into the open dance floor of Momma Bomba’s and watched Junior Ricardo on the stage doing his version of Chicano hip-hop. He was surrounded by whores, other hangers on and Chigger hated that rich bastard. He wished he could go over to Junior’s fancy sports car and take his baseball bat to it.

These are not “touristy” stories. They are deep and hard, a reflection of the regions in which they’re set. In the Alaska segment, Warner focuses on the passions that isolation and weather can bring out in human beings. In his “Hawaiian Island Trilogy,” he looks at a different kind of mythos – the often ethereal dimension of time.