In this lyrical and speculative mosaic novel, enter the fractured worlds of an actress, playwright, and immortal poet, whose legend and influence create an energetic web, equal parts love triangle and haunted house of mirrors. At the bated edge of dream and revelation, spanning New York, Mexico, and a twilight Bardo realm, each of the characters—Viola, Evie and Arturo—undertake metamorphic journeys through the interior hinterlands of the psyche, in their quest for home and spiritual reckoning. Mythology, pop culture, cinema, theater, and sorcery dwell in the multi-chambered heart of the mutable narrative, which includes Joan of Arc, a suicide cult, the Arcana of the Tarot, vaudeville remixes, shamanic alchemy, and a mystical radio whose bandwidth covers all of time, space and history. Re-seed your sense of wonder and the marvelous, as you step into the shadowy labyrinth that is The Last Furies.
Urban slice-of-life in this live reading from my novel, No Man’s Brooklyn, at last November’s Prose Month event.
NO MAN’S BROOKLYN:
From the valentine boneyards of working-class Brooklyn, comes a tale of first love, lost innocence, tragedy, and forgiveness.
Daniel Trovato, having left his native Bensonhurst years ago to start a new life in L.A., is recently sober and enjoying cult success through his Sworn Witness series of graphic novels. When he receives word that his childhood love, Anya, the girl to whose absence he has remained faithful, has died from an overdose, he is compelled to return home. It is there that he will walk through the ghostly twilight of an unfinished past, and revisit both the romantic lore and shadow-life of his childhood. The enduring torch he’s carried for Anya, “the girl from nowhere,” who was found in a trashcan and adopted by a Russian family; the hazy circumstances of his mother’s suicide when he was fourteen; glacial estrangement from his father; the street-and-concrete joys, follies and rawness of an urban boyhood. Ultimately, No Man’s Brooklyn is about the mythic journey we take to meet our core self, and a lyrical testament to the words of Dylan Thomas: “The memories of childhood have no order, and no end.”
I had the privilege of writing the introductory essay for Passage of Days, an exquisite collection of photographs by world-renowned photographer, Pierre-Toutain-Dorbec. Soon to be released.
PASSAGE OF DAYS: Through a lens starkly, undertake a photographic odyssey into the sun-baked heart of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Spanning the years 1975-1981, Pierre Toutain’s Dorbec’s visits with the Imazighen people who live in the Imilchil region, led to a visual record and testament to a pastoral way of life attuned to the cyclical flux of seasons, to the rhythms of nature herself. This exquisite black-and-white collection reflects a chronologically compressed life in the day of the Imazighen, underscored by the interior narratives and silent stories implied in a stunning montage of portraits, while also capturing the grit, symmetry and high-desert mystique of the resident landscape.
Dreams,
undeferred,
coupled with Hope,
that thing unfettered,
to keep us company
and warm our solitude,
as we stumble bravely
through a long night’s journey
into the bated gospel
of days rising to claim us.
