"Liberté, Egalité, SororitéIt’s 1885. When murderous circumstances force two widows--Annie & Euphémie
and the precocious Auguste to flee their French village, a quartet of missionaries from the Church of Solemn stow them away within the Statue of Liberty’s head on a steamer that arrives in New York after a deadly tempest. From NY, the Solemnites usher the refugees to the staid village of Solemn, Indiana, where pleasure is forbidden.
The village embraces the refugees while at the same time avoiding certain delicate subjects, including the relationship between the two widows, as well as Auguste’s endless blasphemies.
These delicate subjects become unavoidable when Solemn is tapped to host the All-Tent Revival. The revival calls itself a “multi-denominational marketplace for God.” More accurate would be: “a time-bomb composed of two-hundred rival factions of late-19th-century American crack-pot religious sects.”
Guess who sets off that bomb.
With its cast of obedient romantics, mystical nutbags, and adorable cynics, Sister Liberty is the rollicking, thunderous introductory volume to The Stables Family Chronicles.
WARNING! THIS AUDIOBOOK CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF: whistling, allegorical situations, lesbians, apostasy, and a pleasure wheel. Also: Eleven instances of the word fuck. "
"WINNER OF THE COLORADO BOOK AWARD
The first volume of Gregory Hill’s award-winning Strattford County Series, East of Denver is an unflinching look at rural America, a poignant, darkly comic tale about a father and son finding their way as their livelihood slowly disintegrates.
When Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams returns to his family’s farm to bury his dead cat, he finds his prematurely-senile father living in squalor. There’s no money, the land is fallow, and what the hell happened to the old man’s beloved Cessna airplane?
With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare becomes caretaker to his father and the farm. Drawn by desperation to reunite with a misfit crew of old classmates—losers, same as he—and motivated by boredom as much as by revenge, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot to rob the town bank.
What ensues is all kinds of funny: peculiar, ha-ha, & why-am-I-crying?
WARNING! THIS NOVEL CONTAINS IRREVERENT DEPICTIONS OF: rural Americanism, death (primarily that of small mammals), early-onset dementia, and eating disorders. Also: thirty-nine instances of the word “fuck”."
"The sun's been setting for several months. Nobody's blinking. And no matter how hard he blows, the referee's whistle doesn't make a sound. Time to make up some new rules.
With audacious humor, unpredictable turns, and outlandish calls, Zebra Skin Shirt is the brilliantly-conceived conclusion/solution to Gregory Hill’s Strattford County Series.
Before the clocks stopped, Narwhal Slotterfield was an ordinary basketball referee. He blew his whistle. He stretched the rules. He even had a girlfriend.
But then the clock thing happened.
Now it’s 7:23 pm, Narwhal’s in a diner in the middle of the Great Plains, and now is all he’s got.
Left to wander a planet where people stand like manikins and raindrops never reach the earth, our ref soon realizes he has the power to officiate the universe itself, an endeavor that leads him along a philosophical mobius strip wrapped around the world as tightly as a wedding ring.
A love story, in other words.
DANGER! THIS NOVEL CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF: Hallucinatory drugs, self-loathing, time-warpage, and numerous flashbacks. Also: fifty-eight instances of the word fuck."
"The first volume of Gregory Hill’s award-winning Strattford County Series, East of Denver is an unflinching look at rural America, a poignant, darkly comic tale about a father and son finding their way as their livelihood slowly disintegrates.
When Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams returns to his family’s farm to bury his dead cat, he finds his prematurely-senile father living in squalor. There’s no money, the land is fallow, and what the hell happened to the old man’s beloved Cessna airplane?
With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare becomes caretaker to his father and the farm. Drawn by desperation to reunite with a misfit crew of old classmates—losers, same as he—and motivated by boredom as much as by revenge, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot to rob the town bank.
What ensues is all kinds of funny: peculiar, ha-ha, & why-am-I-crying.
WARNING! THIS NOVEL CONTAINS IRREVERENT DEPICTIONS OF: rural Americanism, death (primarily that of small mammals), early-onset dementia, and eating disorders. Also: thirty-nine instances of the word fuck."
"Someone shot his dad. Something killed his horse. So...anybody wanna a drink?
Author Gregory Hill trades the mythos of the classic western for a psychological what-the-hell ride within a landscape of supernatural paranoia and cryptic humor.
It’s 1975 and cowboy Johnny Riles is a headcase. He’s depressed, he’s drunk, and he’s Lonesome as hell.
Left by his family to care for the ranch on his own, Johnny manages to keep the cattle alive while struggling to justify his own existence. Embittered by the success of his younger brother, Kitch, a professional basketball player, it is only thanks to a salt-dry sense of humor and a plentiful supply of whiskey that Johnny keeps himself above ground.
On really bad days, he scavenges for arrowheads on the other side of the river that doesn’t run. It calms him down, he says, to collect the old shards.
On one of these bad days, Johnny uncovers an artifact far older than an arrowhead. The relic will plunge him into the terrifying underworlds of the Great Plains, where pity and kindness are indistinguishable from despair.
ALERT! THIS NOVEL CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF: Cigarette smoking, whiskey consumption, claustrophobic situations, and a basketball game involving a character who was in no way inspired by the life of David Thompson. Also: twenty-eight instances of the word fuck."
