Elegy Written on a Crowded Street

Elegy Written on a Crowded Street PDF Author: Peter Plate
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609802071
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Welcome to San Francisco: the first fully gentrified city in America. May Jones is a bail bondswoman, someone who makes her living by putting people back onto the streets. Her most recent client, a young black woman, is on trial for the murder of her boyfriend, a police informant in the Fillmore District, also known as the "Harlem of the West," the neighborhood that the powers-that-be of San Francisco would like more than anything to see disappear. May becomes a target of the police, and of her own shadowed past among the people of Fillmore—strippers, alcoholic policemen, psychic gunshot victims, fugitives—as she walks the narrowest tightrope on the West Coast: the line of personal conscience that separates justice from authority. By turns lyrical, incisive, hilarious, and bittersweet, Peter Plate's Elegy Written On A Crowded Street explores the human cost of the twenty-first century American city with a unique honesty, beauty, and moral power.

Elegy Written on a Crowded Street

Elegy Written on a Crowded Street PDF Author: Peter Plate
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609802071
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
Welcome to San Francisco: the first fully gentrified city in America. May Jones is a bail bondswoman, someone who makes her living by putting people back onto the streets. Her most recent client, a young black woman, is on trial for the murder of her boyfriend, a police informant in the Fillmore District, also known as the "Harlem of the West," the neighborhood that the powers-that-be of San Francisco would like more than anything to see disappear. May becomes a target of the police, and of her own shadowed past among the people of Fillmore—strippers, alcoholic policemen, psychic gunshot victims, fugitives—as she walks the narrowest tightrope on the West Coast: the line of personal conscience that separates justice from authority. By turns lyrical, incisive, hilarious, and bittersweet, Peter Plate's Elegy Written On A Crowded Street explores the human cost of the twenty-first century American city with a unique honesty, beauty, and moral power.

Night of the Short Eyes

Night of the Short Eyes PDF Author: Peter Plate
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 164421315X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
San Francisco is on the verge of collapse in this gritty, grimy noir set in a near-future that gets closer every second. Former San Francisco Literary Laureate Peter Plate who taught himself to write fiction during eight years squatting in abandoned buildings, delivers a fast-paced dystopian and speculative novel — the latest in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out-of-control gentrification in the Bay Area. California is on fire. Everyone has the virus. Sinister patrols of SWAT teams seem to materialize out of thin air, and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up exiled down in Bakersfield. In the middle of it all, the nearly thirteen-year-old narrator in Night of the Short Eyes must take care of his mess of a family—Dad is in jail for stealing guns with his partner, Ronnie, and Mom is shacking up with the social worker assigned to the family’s case—and he only has one thing to his advantage: he speaks perfect English. Refugees from Russia stream into San Francisco as our narrator approaches his next birthday. His younger brother (nicknamed Putin, “on account of his broken English and heavy accent.”) seems determined to make trouble if he cannot find it himself, which shouldn’t be hard when even crossing the street is a walk on the dangerous side. In this world of worsening climate disasters, and set against the backdrop of a cold war that never ended, Night of the Short Eyes, the new book from Peter Plate may be his most outrageous novel yet. Written with lyrical grace and propulsive momentum, Plate’s latest vision of California is so warped that it just might come to pass.

With Death Laughing

With Death Laughing PDF Author: Peter Plate
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609809262
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
It’s Christmastime in the Southland in this near-future vision of 21st century California. Our narrators, an ex-con turned pistol-carrying priest, and Sugar Child, a halfway house resident, have just met. The priest is a donations solicitor for Blessed World, the church and charity, and works downtown, “where I bang a tambourine and beg for money in the mellifluous, singsong voice beloved by children worldwide: Help the needy, give to the poor, amen.” But nothing is going right. Hassled by SWAT cops, and troubled after a failed marriage, he’s losing faith in himself. Sugar Child has her own problems. She’s arrested by SWAT police, and sent to “lockdown.” Her opinion of the priest is no better: She’s never met a man who was stronger than a woman. Looking at him, she never will. As the days speed toward Christmas—holiday shoppers aren’t giving him any money—the priest wonders whether there isn’t some new mission awaiting him, one that’ll help the people in the street, or perhaps one that will lead to his imprisonment. And as he bangs on his tambourine it becomes clear that the one thing he wants most is to take Sugar Child to the “promised land,” because what would Christmas be this year without an act of freedom. A novel that is also a psychic history in a time of attrition, With Death Laughing is a utopian crime story where the line between thievery and charity all but disappears.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard PDF Author: Thomas Gray
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description


The Mothers' Book

The Mothers' Book PDF Author: Caroline French Benton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child rearing
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description


The Household Book of Poetry

The Household Book of Poetry PDF Author: Charles Anderson Dana
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 974

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Book Description


The Poems of Jenyns, Wilkie, and Graeme. [With the Lives of Jenyns, Wilkie and Graeme by Richard A. Davenport. With Plates.]

The Poems of Jenyns, Wilkie, and Graeme. [With the Lives of Jenyns, Wilkie and Graeme by Richard A. Davenport. With Plates.] PDF Author: Soame Jenyns (the Poet.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description


Choice Literature

Choice Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Readers
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description


The Annual Anthology

The Annual Anthology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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One Foot Off the Gutter

One Foot Off the Gutter PDF Author: Peter Plate
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609800540
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The time is 1996. Our narrator, Coddy, a policeman, is underpaid, sleep-deprived, and overweight. Coddy’s partner, Bellamy, is homeless, living out of their shared squad car, littering the back seat with his dirty underwear and empty cigarette packs. Free Box and Barbie are squatters who rob Rainbow Health Foods at gunpoint for something to eat. From the junkies openly shooting up on stoops to the homeless men with their fleets of shopping carts piled high with garbage, Peter Plate’s Mission District is "a catechism in destruction," one that doesn’t end until someone is apprehended for an unsolved crime. A story about inner-city, west coast gentrification at the end of the 20th century.