Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. One day during his ninth-grade Speech class Kelly Daniels's outlaw, soul-surfer father appears at school unannounced and pulls the boy from class. Speeding down the freeway, Daniels's father admits that he has been involved in a crime, but he does not remember how it happened. He'd been up for days on cocaine and booze, he explains, and the next thing he knew he woke up in jail with a bad feeling. It was almost a relief when the guard told him he'd killed his cousin Barkley, a drug kingpin of sorts. "I'm sorry to lay this on you," he tells the stunned boy, "but I'm not going to be around to watch your back. Barkley has a son your age...and this kid might come after you someday. You're going to have to learn to look after yourself." A few days later, the father skips bail and flees the country. "Forget about him," everybody says. But the boy doesn't forget. Someday, he believes, they'll find each other, the fugitive father and the dreamy son, and together they'll surf perfect, faraway waves. "Daniels more or less raised himself, as the son of Christian cultists fallen on hard times in the California desert in the 1970s.... [H]e writes about those years of poverty and lost wandering with a nuanced objectivity that is wise as only very good writers can be wise: He draws beauty out of humiliation and fear with the precision and evocative power of his language and the relentlessness of his gaze."—Jaimy Gordon "In [his work] you'll encounter a writer of dynamic prose, of expertly modulated sentences, and pitch perfect, often hilarious dialogue; a writer with a haunting sense of atmosphere, and considerable narrative invention."—Stuart Dybek

Cloudbreak, California

Biographies & Memoirs

Daniels, Kelly

Regional U.S.

Owl Canyon Press

Max Caruthers, a born-again Christian with a hard-living past, tracks his father, Norman Caruthers, who abandoned him decades before to the lawless wilds of present-day Guatemala. All Norman wants is to be left alone to drink away his remaining days undisturbed in the little bar that serves as home. Up north in California, Vicki Valle, former girlfriend of a recently assassinated Los Angeles gang leader, is deported over a triviality into Tijuana. She decides to bring the skills she learned in L.A.--both in the gang and in business classes attended at City College--back to her roots in El Salvador, where she meets Caruthers at a drop-off in the capital city. He's been roped into delivering a busload of Mayan girls, en route to lives of prostitution in the United States. Intrigued by the gringo trafficker and the potential of expanding her gang's territory into largely untapped Guatemala, Valle catches a ride with Caruthers back to his home base in Panajachel, just in time to crash his reunion with his earnest son, Max, who has come to the country on a religious mission, as well as his personal mission to find his father. Max, his father, Vicki, and Max's new local girlfriend Karma, eventually become entangled in a gun-running operation that ends in a shootout between an anti-gang vigilante group and Vicki's crew of criminals. Vicki, the sole survivor of her gang's massacre, is now known as Itzel, a Kekchi Mayan displaced far from home in a dusty little town in extreme southwest Guatemala. Having arrived suddenly, this silent, solitary woman in traditional clothes is a mystery to the townspeople, but soon they will come to better understand her story.

A Candle for San Simón

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Owl Canyon Pr

Step inside the life of 1990's rural Montana, as three lives become intertwined; three souls reach desperation; each becoming hard pressed to dramatically alter the course of their lives. Becca Brannen, drowning in the depths of her grief after losing her husband, makes the difficult decision to sell the family ranch and move back to Cahill, Montana, back to the comfort of family and the familiarity of her small hometown. Will Madsen struggles daily with the bitter aftertaste of betrayal. His wife, Cassandra, had seemed so perfectly suited to his life as a cattle rancher running one of the biggest spreads in western Montana. Historically, the Madsen family had been integral in keeping the heartbeat of Cahill pulsing strongly. With divorce papers delivered to his hand and the proverbial dagger protruding from his back, Will realized it was all a sham, a con set in place to swindle him out of prime real estate through the divorce settlement. Hate and rage had become his constant companions, pushing away those closest to him, estranging him from the town and life that were his lifeblood. Cassandra Madsen lived life the only way she knew how. She learned early on, through countless foster homes, court systems and occasional stop offs at her severely broken childhood home, how to get what she wanted. Manipulation, deceit, and constant compromise of what little personal morals she had were common weapons in her arsenal. Mountains of grief, betrayal, anger, and a lifetime of abuse, neglect and regret. Can they be scaled and conquered?

Hardpressed: Redeeming the Day

Romance

Blurb

CITIZENSHIP PREP: A Guide to Passing the U.S. Citizenship Test; 2021 Edition

Test Preparation

Gordon, Bob

Citizenship

Independently published

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