Early morning wind, and other stories (Writing, 29)

Herd, Dale

Four Seasons Foundation

Diamonds

Mudra

Wild Cherries

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Tombouctou Books

Praise for Dale Herd:
"A world takes place here with extraordinary economy: articulate, fragile, heartfelt."—Robert Creeley
"Dale Herd's writing has affected the way I look at the world, as well as opening me up to one more possibility of how to transform the world into words, and his books certainly deserve a place on the highest shelf."—American Book Review
From high school love notes to a drug runner's day; from a boy's first fistfight to the unexpected aftermath of a woman's first experience of marijuana, Dale Herd's stories travel the backroads, sending postcards of life as it is lived.

Empty Pockets: New and Selected Stories

Coffee House Press

Product Description Set in the blighted industrial landscape of the Los Angeles basin, Dreamland Court is an underground love story.Just out of prison, Johnny Dalton returns home to find his wife Jackie, the mother of his two small children, passionately involved with one of his good friends. Doing everything in his power to win her back, Johnny blunders his way through one criminal enterprise after another. When the cops pick him up for being the only adult present at a wild teenage party, he’s sent back to jail. The strange thing is, as far as Jackie is concerned, Johnny’s maneuvers actually work. Reminiscent of the pathos in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the comedy of John Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Dale Herd focuses his astute gaze on lives that are ordinarily invisible, while turning the conventional love story on its head. “...and I like Dale Herd for prose.” Allen Ginsberg, Poetry Flash "... not since Raymond Carver has stuff been so raw and true. It leaps out from the page/screen and bites with tender fury." J. H. Prynne “No one writes American better than Dale Herd. His writing is like some bastard offspring of a liaison between Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion—unflinching and streetwise as Bukowski, but with Joan Didion ’s unfailing clarity and intelligence.” Lewis MacAdams, Wet Magazine, a Journal of the Avant-Garde “Herd has an acute sense of what people say as against what they mean. This creates the tension in the prose: that something emotionally unbearable is being spilled out into completely bearable talk.” Keith Abbott, on Wild Cherries, San Francisco Review of Books “Known for his brilliant short prose pieces as published in the books, Early Morning Wind, Wild Cherries, Diamonds, and Empty Pockets, Dale Herd is a meticulous recorder of the language we move around in, and he possesses the skill and guts to take it all the way. His underground novel Dreamland Court is simply a masterpiece.” Kevin Opstedal, Blue Press Books Review Back in the early 20th Century there was a lot of talk in the literary world about "The Great American Novel." Some thought it had already been written in the previous century (e.g. Moby Dick) or claimed newer titles (e.g. The Great Gatsby) or midcentury (e.g. Invisible Man) or later ones (e.g. Beloved). In this century it seems like the absurd game it always was and who cares anyway. But if we were still playing, I'd throw Dale Herd's Dreamland Court into the mix along with the examples cited above and others. A series of mostly overlapping monologues by a varied crew of smalltime drug dealers and thieves and general fuckups and their partners and lovers and spouses and friends, Dreamland Court may not sound inviting, but once you've met them and been drawn into their stories by Herd's original styling and eye and ear for character, you're hooked, Reading Dreamland Court is like watching one of those streaming series that you can't help binging on because you want to see what happens to these uniquely distinct individuals that you've come to know so intimately. Someone once wrote about Hubert Selby's achievement in his novel Last Exit To Brooklyn being that he got readers to care about the "lowlifes" he was writing about. In Dreamland Court the characters themselves seem to write themselves and their stories into existence, and so authentically they continue to live in my consciousness long after I reached the end of the book, which I was sorry to. -- Michael Lally ― Lally's Alley About the Author The author of four books of short stories, Dale Herd’s experience as an itinerant laborer in wrecking yards, fast food kitchens, gas stations, Salvation Army yards, slaughterhouses, on construction sites, train yards, and in social work has shaped his writing. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife. They have three sons. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Jesus Christ, Jac, I’m feeling fine

Dreamland Court: A Novel

City Point Press

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Books by Herd, Dale