The Permanent Press Ord: 139 books

Woodstock Nation, 1969. Apollo Mission to the Moon. Chappaquiddick. Moratorium Day in Washington. My Lai. The draft lottery. New York beats Baltimore in football, baseball, basketball.   Nehru jackets are out. Virginity is still in. Insulated in exotic Crown Heights, Jason Kole is in heaven. Safe...

Darling Clementine is the story of Samantha, a poetess determined to transform her sex life into a meditation: a pathway to enlightenment. Along for the ride is her brand new husband, Arthur Clementine, a wealthy, calm, but crypto-zany assistant district attorney for New York County. The novel begins...

The Regulators is told through the eyes of Warren Hascott, who returns to America after the Revolutionary War, having spent years as a slave to the Moors. He finds the Boston he had known in his youth completely changed. The country is undergoing a depression. City merchants are engaged in an economic...

The Violent Child portrays the life of a tenacious woman who struggled to make a home for her son, to nurture the disabled daughter of her lover, and to embrace the gift of an unexpected, unconventional love. It is the story of a son who finds himself, at the end of his mother’s life, with a final opportunity for reconciliation.

When Fruitful Willis, after years of scraping out a meager living as a bum, discovers that he has been granted a more dignified status as a member of the ‘homeless,’ he stakes a claim on the sidewalk in front of Murray Plotkin’s delicatessen. Murray’s heavy-handed attempts to remove the newly-appointed...

Gou ni itte wa, gou ni shitagae, runs an old Japanese proverb: Obey the customs of the village you enter.   Just don’t overdo things.   It may already be too late for Cricket Collins, a recent Ivy League graduate who travels to Osaka for his first real job as an English instructor. The time is...

“Terse, hard hitting poems that treat the Vietnam War in the style of the Spoon River Anthology: portraits (often posthumous) of 47 marines who served in Vietnam and what the war did to them.” — Los Angeles Herald Examiner

In the West Town area of Chicago, pushed from neighborhood to neighborhood to the burned-out back end of the city, the Puerto Rican Latin Kings gang reigns supreme. Begun in the 1960s by the three brothers of the Matos family, Angel, Bobo, and Reynaldo, the original Latin Kings protected Puerto Rican...

Fellow Travelers is the story of the women in the brothers lives: Katya, the peasant girl Victor rescues from the streets of Moscow; Tania, the communist party functionary who eventually becomes his wife; and Yelena, the singer and cabaret entertainer Manny marries and ultimately destroys. Though...

Harry Cauley’s third novel, Millersburg (Bridie and Finn and The Botticelli Angel preceding), might well be described as “New Jersey Gothic.” It’s set in 1939 in a small town in Northern New Jersey, narrated by Ben, a 17-year-old boy. He’s part of a family ruled by Mamu, his tyrannical grandmother,...

All Honest Men is based on the true-life story of J. Willis Newton, a feisty sharecropper’s son who fled the Texas cotton fields to become the leader of the most successful band of outlaws in American history. It is also a window into one of the country’s most pivotal eras, the early twentieth...

The Vandal is a short, hard diamond of a novel which traces through one man’s enigmatic passage through modern America. From the orchestrated killings at the edge of the nation’s foreign policy to the first love of a young girl, it is a penetrating account of one American who still believes, who...

Toucan Whisper, Toucan Sing is a novel about modern Mexico, the conflicting goals of development versus ecological preservation, and the aspirations and struggles of the indigenous people who service tourists at a beachfront hotel. Central to this tale are two brothers: the ambitious twenty-two-year...

On the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1964, a murderer stalked Bernice Starling, a local blues singer, and killed her by driving a knife into her chest. After the murder, her two teenaged daughters, Jubilee and Charlene, search for the killer, driving their mother’s antique red pick-up truck down sandy...