Certain to become an instant Christmas Classic along side Capote and Dickens, Winter at Long Lake is more than a memoir of a season fifty years ago, it is a return to a time when America, and the world, had not yet realized its limitations. Winner of the Hemingway First Book Award for his novel Flesh (Eaton Street Press), Skwiot moves with grace into non-fiction with his new memoir. Winter at Long Lake allows the author, whose writing Publisher's Weekly called "impressively crafted" and "gripping," to use the skills of his swiftly moving prose to expose the engaging characters of his own youth.

Winter at Long Lake: A Childhood Christmas Memoir

Skwiot, Rick

Religion & Spirituality

all nations press

Rick Skwiot's earthy, funny and self-effacing chronicle of his heathen days south of the border. With little money and few prospects the troubled freelance writer takes off to Mexico to find himself. Instead he discovers fast-living, amoral, yet spiritually grounded Mexicans who infect him with a soulful lust for life. Sexy, surreal, and darkly comic, Skwiot's vivid tale depicts his beneficent immersion into small-town Mexican life amid a group of quirky locals and oddball Anglophone expats. Along the way he paints an intimate and sympathetic portrait of Mexico and its people. Ultimately this sultry memoir seduces any reader who values honest reporting of a spiritual journey in which the author fi nds his deliverance through the senses.

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing

Travel

Mexico

Antaeus Books, Inc.

Hemingway First Novel Award winner. The sensual mystery of a son's compulsive search for his father's bones-a quest that draws him into an exotic Mexican underworld of sex, mysticism, drugs and sudden violence. Vibrant yet darkly poignant, this gritty tale exposes the simmering passions-fired by jealousy, vengeance, lust and greed-when Anglo and Hispanic cultures clash...Little love remains to be lost, seemingly, between cynical public relations man Nick Petrov and his stern, Old World, widower father. But when the eccentric emigre archeologist dies unexpectedly in a backwater Mexican town, the materialistic American son travels to retrieve his father's corpse. However, the secrets of the corrupt mountain pueblito of Escondido--and the seductive powers of a virgin witch--transform Nick's guilt-inspired journey into a quest for his own soul.As Nick seeks answers to his father's death, he bulls his way through a labyrinth of deception, forgery and tangled passions, all superimposed over his own bitter memories of his estrangement from his father. He enters a dark world of illegal trade in Indian artifacts, white witches, malevolent drug soldiers, and quick--and quixotic--death.This award-winning novel reveals the historic struggle of a man questing to understand the timeless ties between father and son, man and woman, life and death.

Death in Mexico

Award-winning novelist Rick Skwiot's critically acclaimed account of a rustically charming yet fateful childhood Christmas, with a family and a nation on the brink of unsettling change and loss of innocence. Christmas at Long Lake returns us to Christmas Day 1953 as seen through the eyes of a child. When the author, as a six-year-old, learns on Christmas Eve that his father's layoff at a steel mill threatens their country home, he works to save it.  Along the way we meet a cast of affecting characters: forbidding grandmothers, tribal country-kids, a destructive vacuum-cleaner salesman, and dutiful and affectionate parents who create an aura of hard yet unfailing love within the author's childhood environs. Skwiot takes us on a sensory and esthetic journey to frozen lakes, frosted fields, squawking jays, and the muted palette of gray Illinois winter afternoons, carrying us into a past of coal stoves, hand-pumps, and independence, as well as to the fragrant markets and redbrick alleys of a segregated St. Louis.Christmas at Long Lake manages to compress an era into 36 hours and 156 pages. It will likely be read with nostalgic recognition by the author's baby-boomer generation, with longing for simpler times by older Americans, and with some disbelief by younger readers who do not realize how much this nation has changed in 50 years.

Christmas at Long Lake - A Childhood Memory

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Hemingway reincarnate, Havana and hurricanes enliven this romantic island tale of love and redemption. In modern-day booze-soaked Key West, former best-selling author Con Martens finds himself down, out and in the bottom of a bottle. Stalked by a jealous lover and a propensity for trouble, Con needs an intervention. And intervention he gets in the form of the young Ernest Hemingway, an angel emissary sent from Writer's Heaven to help Con get back on track as a writer and a man. Blending past and present, the two young renegades forge a friendship as Con quests to recover his talent and integrity and find for himself a home. In Key West Story, we glimpse Key West life from the mangroves to the mansions, and a dark Havana, while spending quality time with Hemingway in his prime, hearing his timeless take on life, love and literature.

Key West Story - A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Exiled to the city's tough North Side, disgraced St. Louis Police Lieutenant Carlo Gabriel wants nothing more than to return to the headquarters hierarchy. To get his wish, all he has to do is track down the missing husband of the mayor's press secretary. Instead he unearths a morass of corruption, educational malpractice, and greed that threatens to consign thousands of at-risk youths to the mean streets of America's erstwhile murder capital. Worse, it';s the kind of information that could get a cop killed. Fighting for his life and his honor, Gabriel ultimately must make a choice that could affect not only his own future, but also that of the city and its top leaders.

Fail

United States

Blank Slate Pr

Signed by author. Hardcover with dust jacket. Easton Street Press, Inc.  Rick Skwiot, Author. Total 216 pages. Winner of the Hemingway First Novel Award.  Originally sold for $22.95.  Printed in the USA. Boards are black with gilt lettering on the spine . The pages are clean and without markings or tears. The spine is tight and straight. "Rick Skwiot unleashes the passionate mystery of a son's compulsive search for his father's bones, a quest that draws him into an exotic Mexican underworld of sex, mysticism, drugs, and sudden violence."   Dust jacket shows light shelf wear. A very good read for a great price!  *6BC1

Flesh

Eaton Street Pr

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