Night Of The Short Eyes

(Paperback)

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Description

A fourteen-year-old who speaks perfect English navigates the Bay Area with his Russian immigrant family -a pill popping mom, a dad in jail, a younger brother-and teen neighbours Frankie and Superman. Former San Francisco poet-laurate Peter Plate who taught himself to write fiction during eight years squatting in abandoned buildings, delivers a grim, funny, and sharp dystopian noir-the latest in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out-of-control gentrification in the Bay Area. A fire burns in the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais. Everyone has the virus. Dad's been sent to prison on gun theft charges. A Pacific Heights kid has gotten Frankie Jones pregnant, so her parents have exiled her to Bakersfield. SWAT teams establish checkpoints. Bob the social worker is making moves on mom. San Francisco is a destination where refugees from Russia come to make a new start. Our narrator is almost twelve. He's a thief. His younger brother is nicknamed Putin, "on account of his broken English and heavy accent." Every day is a walk on the dangerous side. And beneath all of it are the ghosts of a cold war that never ended. Nothing's right with the world, and the only question is whether Peter Plate's San Francisco is some lyrical warped vision of a possible future or the twisted reality that's already here This may be Plate's most outrageous novel, a romp through the world outside our windows that no one wants to see.

Reviews

"A spectacular glimpse into the underbelly of San Francisco. Peter Plate writes with passion and grit about the death of the American city and its lost dream of paradise." Jerome Charyn, author of Big Red

Author Bio

Peter Plate taught himself to write fiction while squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many books, including the novels Police and Thieves, Angels of Catastrophe, Elegy Written on a Crowded Street, Soon the Rest Will Fall, and Dirty in Cashmere, all published by Seven Stories Press.