Keith Maillard: 9 books

The darkest of Keith Maillard’s novels, Motet is “sung” in three radically different voices. Paul, a professor of musicology, is researching a sixteenth century motet and finding a nightmarish story of heresy, persecution, torture and death. Steve, a rock drummer, longs for the transformative...

Boyish Leslie, a retired competitive swimmer turned children’s librarian, and girlish Alan, a fashionable hairstylist, are living parallel lives of thwarted desire, but soon they will be utterly transformed as the middle-aged shaman, Mildred McKenzie, opens the crack between the worlds and hurls...

Evan Carlyle, a bright young man on the make who emigrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, returns to his hometown and runs into the last person he wants to see, his old buddy, the legendary hell-raiser, Alex Warner. Evan’s life has been a series of successes; he has a flashy girlfriend and makes...

Author Keith Maillard received critical acclaim with his novel Gloria, which told the story of a young woman on the cusp of womanhood in a town called Raysburg, West Virginia. In this book, The Clarinet Polka, Maillard turns that same eagle-eyed attention to the other side of the tracks of that very...

Hot Springs, Arkansas by Keith Maillard World War II-era Hot Springs is the foundation for this author's story, a tale about his family's crumbling dynamics in troublesome times. "'Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,' my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think...

John Dupre, a junior at West Virginia University, is an English major on the Dean's List dressed up as a Beatnik cowboy, the folk-singing resident outsider before nonconformity became a youth uniform. Morgantown is a masterful ensemble piece centering around John and peopled by his unforgettable...

It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of JFK has left John Dupre—and all of America— with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that Southern asshole with a public persona cut from an old rock and roll song: I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW. It's oppressively hot, the kind of heat that makes...

In this, the first volume of Difficulty at the Beginning, John Dupre is a student at Raysburg Military Academy, where his best friend Lyle Ledzinski is training him to be a perfect Socratic athlete: “A sound mind in a sound body.”Together they want to experience all of life — athletics, philosophy,...

The Summer of Love is already like a distant memory; the psychedelic underground has turned in on itself. John Dupre has deserted a perfectly satisfying life as a student in Toronto, drawn back to the US by the need to make a difference in the Revolution. He's living in Boston—under an assumed name...