The Permanent Press: 217 books

Bob Otis, an unmarketable author who is just starting his own publishing company in order to get his latest novels in print, is abruptly sidetracked when a relative, so distant that Otis doesn’t even place him, phones from Chicago with a request: his father, who has just died, wishes to be buried...

Stanley Noseworthy is, at best, a serial monogamist. At worst, a faithless rake. Now his record-breaking long-term lover (“1001 better-than-Arabian nights”) Nina is fed up with his “inimitable bull%#$#” and threatening to end their relationship. “Show us there is some good in you,” Stanley’s...

There’s real despair in Bennett’s Corners, Ohio. It’s 1934, and The Great Depression is dragging on. That’s not to say young people don’t have their big burning ambitions, their uncontrollable urges. They do.   Will Randall’s dream is to go to the Chicago World’s Fair, to see the technological...

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...

A midsummer morning, Brooklyn, 1955. Oscar Carnovsky, a respectable (yet hardly distinguished) middle-aged man, leaves for work in the usual fashion: takes his share of the morning paper, kisses his wife goodbye, and waves back as he turns the corner of Linden Boulevard. He has done it precisely this...

“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...

High in the towering Andes, a man is on the run, being chased as much by his own raging demons as by encircling army patrols. He is Ramon Cordes, the man many consider the greatest, and perhaps last, romantic revolutionary of our time. Cordes has been betrayed. But by whom? Was it Marguerite, the...

This comic third novel in our Berry Fleming series centers on Lucinda, a local girl-makes-good, who returns on her psychoanalyst’s suggestion to Fredricksville, Georgia, in order to “find herself.” A successful author and playwright in New York City, she poses a distinct problem for the residents...

Captain Bennett’s Folly is a direct descendant of Fleming’s earlier comic novels, Colonel Effingham's Raid and Lucinderella. Like them, there is a narrator—in this case Walker Williams—who reports an adventure replete with rogues and innocents, while making an artful, funny and wistful case...

This sprawling novel concerns the lives of two generations in one family; of their loves both licit and illicit, of their work, and of their personal triumphs and tragedies. It is a story, at first, about the three Woodruff brothers: Peter, a businessman, Leonard, an artist, and Ike, an attorney and...

At 5 P.M. on a snowy night, Maurice Locksley, sometime literary stud, stops off at a Boston pub and there, with a glass of beer, launches a 10 1/2 hour journey into the riskier regions of the heart. First he’s off to dinner with his wife and 4-year-old son . . . then on to an evening in the suburbs,...

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...