Perhaps the most important anarchist prose writer around today. This is a collection of three long stories, re-examining American history, forgotten moments in the class struggle, and the psyche of a seriously messed up nation. Dissident, angry and troubled. An essential addition to anyone's bookshelf.

Black Wheel of Anger: Three Novels

Literature & Fiction

Plate, Peter

Short Stories & Anthologies

A K Press Distribution

Darkness Throws Down the Sun

The Romance of the American Living-Room (Fiction series)

Polygon

Euthanasia is a time bomb set to go off in every American suburb. California placed the detonator and this book charts the explosion. This is a novel about obsession, fear and half lives. The Operator offers the ultimate solution to having your cake, eating it and finding it stale.

A Kamikaze in Her Eyes

Pressure Drop Press

A cop is gunned down and unless Ricky Durrutti, a petty criminal with a short biography and a long rap sheet, can figure out who the real shooter is, he's a dead man. From Hunt's Donuts, opposite where the killing took place, to his room in the El Capitán Hotel, from the blue grass and steel Federal Building off Golden Gate Avenue to the Ritmo Latino record store, and from the Roxie Cinema on 16th Street to the Ramshackle Victorian homes of Treat Street where Lonely Boy lives--the chase is on. Salvadoreno gangs and Mexicans, cops and Jewish gangsters, drag queens and heroin addicts, speed freaks and low rent hookers, low-lives rising rising to the challenge of making sense of a murder. Out of the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski, here is the twenty-first century world of Peter Plate.

The Angels of Catastrophe: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

Seven Stories Press

Amid a background of bank robberies and fatal gunshot wounds, the real drama here is bureaucratic and human. In her response to the adversity all around her, Peter Plate’s Charlene Hassler, a social worker at the huge, anthill-like Department of Social Services complex on San Francisco’s Otis Street, is a literary tour de force. Straight out of Dante’s Inferno, Plate’s DSS is an eternal holding pen of unfulfilled needs and desires. Charlene is under investigation, and snitches are everywhere. A co-worker is murdered. Charlene’s boss and former mentor spends amorous afternoons with her arch-enemy. The custodian burglarizes her desk, then shoots her in the knee after he imagines she’s ratted on him. As the anger and chaos at DSS reach epic proportions, we witness the strange heroism of Charlene’s coworkers when they foil a hold-up; her boss’s real vulnerability after a suicide attempt; and Charlene herself triumphantly winning her personal battle for romance in this true human comedy.

Snitch Factory

Contemporary

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.

One Foot off the Gutter

The narrator of Police and Thieves, Doojie, is a small-time dealer who lives in a garage behind a laundromat with his two partners in crime. They sell dope of questionable quality at reasonable prices. But when one night Doojie sees a renegade cop shoot an unarmed Mexican, he knows that things are about to change. Soon he and his buddies are running for their lives. Fast, ferocious, gritty, and bleak, Police and Thieves is contemporary noir at its best, and one of the most ambitious entries in the Peter Plate canon.

Police and Thieves: A Novel

One foggy day in San Francisco brings together bloody ghosts, a dandyish thug, capricious cops, a suicidal punk rocker, a hyperliterate slumlord, and a sweet old lady sent by God to hand out cash from a hijacked armored car. In Fogtown, Peter Plate uses a loving hand to carve his characters out of hallucination, perversity, and tenacity. Plate's noir sensibility gives him special fluency with the weary souls of urban America's down and out; Fogtown describes a new age unmistakably built on the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski.

Fogtown

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

It seems like everyone in California is going to prison these days. And as another hot Christmas approaches in San Francisco, Robert Grogan and Slatts Calhoun are about to make the street after a stretch in San Quentin. On the inside Robert and Slatts were inmates and lovers, but Robert has a young wife and a daughter on the outside and they’re probably not going to be thrilled about sharing him with Slatts. Trouble waits for them in the whitened winter sunlight of the city. Bleak and magical, afflicted with winos, yuppies, lawyers, tourists, parole officers, drug dealers, and cops, Soon the Rest Will Fall tells a tale of blight, recidivism, and transcendent love. Peter Plate brings us his best work to date—a manic, intensely human, and lyrical portrait of two cons trying to make it in the sweltering holiday madhouse of a three-time loser’s city by the bay.

Soon the Rest Will Fall: A Novel

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Books by Plate, Peter