East Bay Grease

In a tough portrayal of adolescent survival and life on the edge, a young man growing up in 1960s and 1970s Oakland finds solace in music when he moves into a very tough neighborhood with his near-crazy father. A first novel. 15,000 first printing. Tour.

Literature & Fiction

Williamson, Eric Miles

United States

Picador USA

In Eric Miles Williamson's debut novel, young T-Bird Murphy seeks to gain a foothold in the turbulent and menacing world of 60's and 70's Oakland. While his mother runs with Hell's Angel's bikers, T-Bird falls beneath the men's fists and favors, finds solace and hope in the slightest of rewards, and seeks to survive. Soon, his ex-con father returns to town, and what follows is a raw, powerful, poetic story of one boy's passage into adulthood.

East Bay Grease, Eric Miles Williamson’s now classic first novel, has received worldwide acclaim as one of the great depictions of working-class America in the latter half of the 20th century. The story of T-Bird Murphy, born in the tumultuous 1960’s and raised in the ghettoes of Oakland, California variously by his mother, who rides with the Hell’s Angels, his father, who is an ex-convict, and the father figures who range from musicians to construction workers, East Bay Grease is a novel of dignity, honor, and courage that has been compared to the works of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.

Contemporary

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent. From the book: “Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads their works except for other literary authors and the professors who are evaluating their tenure and promotion folders at the colleges and universities at which they are employed, and it’s a minor miracle if a literary book from a small press sells a thousand copies. Fiction writers from wealth write about writing or they write about the ridiculous “sufferings” of the rich. Fiction writers from the lower classes write about the primordial filth from which they’ve physically escaped but from which they’ll never mentally be able to leave behind. Like war veterans, people who’ve fought it out in the miasma of poverty and blue- collar hell can never get the stink out of their skins, try as they may. Just like people who haven’t been to war can spot vets who have, middle-class people and the rich can spot people who’ve grown up poor, no matter what their position in life or the quality of their designer suits. Those suits just don’t fit right, and the neckties make them fidget and sweat. What the well-heeled authors and the working-class writers have in common is that they’ve been trained not to pronounce moral judgment.”

Say It Hot, Volume II:: Industrial Strength Essays on American Writers

History & Criticism

Texas Review Press

Novels about the blue-collar world are rare: Seldom does someone near the cellar of society escape to tell the tale. Eric Miles Williamson joined the Laborers Union when he graduated from high school in 1979 and spent seven years as a gunite construction worker, witnessing atrocities that don't make the evening news. Two-Up is Williamson's fictional account of a journey through the nightmare of the American labor inferno.

Two-Up: A Novel

Welcome to Oakland

The sheer energy and passion and intensity, the linguistic virtuosity of Eric Miles Williamson's latest novel, WELCOME TO OAKLAND, will leave readers breathless. The vigor and uncensored redneck honesty of T-Bird Murphy's blue-collar voice will at turns delight, offend, amuse and enrage readers as T-Bird gives us what we're not supposed to hear: the groans, gritos and war-whoops of men when they're not behaving like gentlemen, when they're out of sight and earshot, when they're wrapped around their drinks at Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge or your local workingman's watering hole. In WELCOME TO OAKLAND, the T-Bird Murphy of Williamson's internationally acclaimed novel, East Bay Grease, is now a man. He's been divorced twice, and he finds himself hiding out in a garage in rural Missouri for a reason we're never told, confused and stunned, shell-shocked by the hand life has dealt him. He opens his story, "I'm always happiest when I live in a dump, and I've lived in some serious shitholes," but it's difficult to believe him. What unfolds is the story of a workingman who tries his hardest to escape the hell of the Oakland ghetto, who finds honor in squalor, kinship among the broken divorcees of Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, dignity and beauty at the garbage dumps where he sleeps in the cab of the scow he drives for a living.

Literary

Raw Dog Screaming Pr

The sheer energy and passion and intensity, the linguistic virtuosity of Eric Miles Williamson's latest novel, WELCOME TO OAKLAND, will leave readers breathless. The vigor and uncensored redneck honesty of T-Bird Murphy's blue-collar voice will at turns delight, offend, amuse and enrage readers as T-Bird gives us what we're not supposed to hear: the groans, gritos and war-whoops of men when they're not behaving like gentlemen, when they're out of sight and earshot, when they're wrapped around their drinks at Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge or your local workingman's watering hole. In WELCOME TO OAKLAND, the T-Bird Murphy of Williamson's internationally acclaimed novel, East Bay Grease, is now a man. He's been divorced twice, and he finds himself hiding out in a garage in rural Missouri for a reason we're never told, confused and stunned, shell-shocked by the hand life has dealt him. He opens his story, "I'm always happiest when I live in a dump, and I've lived in some serious shitholes," but it's difficult to believe him. What unfolds is the story of a workingman who tries his hardest to escape the hell of the Oakland ghetto, who finds honor in squalor, kinship among the broken divorcees of Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, dignity and beauty at the garbage dumps where he sleeps in the cab of the scow he drives for a living.

Raw Dog Screaming Press

14 Fictional Positions

In France, Eric Miles Williamson is known as "The Erudite Bukowski." In America, he has been called "The Last Beat."  Best known for his internationally praised and stunning novels of the blue-collar world, with the publication of 14 Fictional Positions, Williamson now shows his readers he is much more than a chronicler of the lives of workers and America's downtrodden. Williamson may have triumphantly captured the blue-collar experience in his novels, East Bay Grease, Two-Up, and Welcome to Oakland, but 14 Fictional Positions shows us that he, above all, is a painstakingly careful author deeply entrenched in the history of his medium. Former editor of Chelsea and Gulf Coast, now editor of American Book Review, The Texas Review, and Boulevard, longtime member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and a college teacher since 1984, Williamson may have humble beginnings, but he is now a powerful force in America's literary establishment.  Each of the stories in 14 Fictional Positions snaps with precision and intelligence. In "Hope, Among Other Vices and Virtues," we find two men drinking "in manly tandem" whose women loathe them as much as they love them. "I love you," says Agnes. "You are everything in a man I want to change." "H A N G M A N," set evidently in Brazil, weaves "a leaf-fringed legend" of two lovers whose lives are dictated by the formal arrangement of words and literary references. In "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" Williamson shows himself to be an aphorist of the caliber of George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oscar Wilde, both witty and erudite. "The Teachings of Don B." is a ghost story unlike any other in the English language, humorous and sad, insightful and playful, an homage to the foremost of Williamson's many prominent mentors, who include Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue, Ronald Sukenick, Jacques Derrida, Edward Dorn, and, of course, the ghost of Donald Barthelme.  Twenty-five years in the making, 14 Fictional Positions is a landmark short story collection, and confirmation that Eric Miles Williamson is an author whose energy, talent, and wisdom place him among the very best authors at work today in America.

Acclaimed novelist, editor, and critic Eric Miles Williamson, with the publication of his first book of nonfiction, establishes himself as one of the premier critics of his generation. There is no other book that resembles Oakland, Jack London, and Me. The parallels between the lives of Jack London and Eric Miles Williamson are startling: Both grew up in the same waterfront ghetto of Oakland, California; neither knew who his father was; both had insane mothers; both did menial jobs as youths and young men; both spent time homeless; both made their treks to the Northlands; both became authors; and both cannot reconcile their attitudes toward the poor, what Jack London calls "the people of the abyss." With this as a premise, Williamson examines not only the life and work of Jack London, but his own life and attitudes toward the poor, toward London, Oakland, culture and literature. A blend of autobiography, criticism, scholarship, and polemic, Oakland, Jack London, and Me is a book written not just for academics and students. Jack London remains one of the best-selling American authors in the world, and Williamson's Oakland, Jack London, and Me is as accessible as any of the works of London, his direct literary forbear and mentor.

Oakland, Jack London, and Me: A Literary Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williamson, Eric Miles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Williamson, Eric Miles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williamson, Eric Miles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

East Bay Grease

East Bay Grease

East Bay Grease

Say It Hot, Volume II:: Industrial Strength Essays on American Writers

Two-Up: A Novel

Two-Up: A Novel

Welcome to Oakland

Welcome to Oakland

14 Fictional Positions

Oakland, Jack London, and Me: A Literary Biography