JAMES WADE
FIUME, CANTA ​
Longlisted per il Reading the West Book Award for Fiction
Una selezione di Barnes & Noble degli e-book indipendenti preferiti del 2021
Una scelta della rivista Deep South per la lettura estiva
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Tentando di sfuggire al padre violento e a generazioni di povertà ciclica, il giovane Jonah Hargrove si unisce al misterioso fiume - un'adolescente che trasporta migliaia di dollari di metanfetamina rubata - e si imbarca in un'odissea gotica meridionale attraverso i fondali del fiume Texas orientale.
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Sono perseguitati dal boss della droga locale, John Curtis, e dal suo assassino assassino, Dakota Cade, con il quale River aveva una relazione sentimentale. Ma Cade e Curtis hanno i loro nemici, poiché il loro rapporto con il cartello che controlla la loro fornitura di metanfetamina inizia a peggiorare.
A tenere d'occhio tutti c'è The Thin Man, un assassino silenzioso che apprezza le conseguenze piuttosto che la misericordia.
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Ogni persona sta nascondendo i segreti degli altri -- segreti mortali che verranno smascherati in modo selvaggio quando i loro percorsi finali si scontrano e tutti sono costretti a venire a patti con le proprie scelte, le proprie circostanze e la propria definizione di Dio.
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Con un cast colorato di personaggi secondari e una violenza incrollabile giustapposta alla prosa lirica, River, Sing Out si tuffa in un mondo sinistro e sanguinario, dove la povertà opprimente si contrappone al bisogno di credere in qualcosa di più grande di sé.
"James Wade is a poet of the dark. With gorgeous lyricism, he writes of men and women caught in the bleakest of circumstances and the choices that must be made when desperate times require desperate measures. It's been forever since I read a novel so stunning in its language and so moving in its effect. Read this book and prepare to be amazed."
-- William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author of Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land
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"Narrative prowess and atmospheric prose echo the works of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy, resulting in a rich, character-driven story."
-- "Deep South Magazine"
"Hollow Out the Dark is a major achievement in Southern noir, a Prohibition-era crime epic that is at heart an affecting exploration of brotherhood in its many forms. With lyrical prose and sly period dialogue, James Wade builds a propulsive narrative that explodes with revelation. A haunting read that lingers in the memory long after the final page."
-- "Scott Von Doviak, Edgar Award-nominated author of Lowdown Road and Charlesgate Confidential"
"A war-for-whiskey Western in a small Texas town with prose that sings like Cormac, Woodrell, and Walter Hill formed a boy band. James Wade has packed a wallop of a gothic gut-punch about discovering where one's moral compass may land while spinning in a Depression-era storm of violence, corruption, and the hardest of times."
-- "Mike McCrary, author of Someone Savage and the Remo Cobb series"
"In Hollow Out the Dark, James Wade's latest Southern-gothic feat, Wade stitches a propulsive tale with Biblical thread, fueling it with whiskey, tucking secrets beneath the floorboards, and draping the Depression-era landscape with suspense. Wade builds himself a well-deserved seat, pulling it to the literary table to sit alongside the likes of Ron Rash, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy."
-- "Robert Gwaltney, author of The Cicada Tree, and Georgia Author of the Year"
"With addictive prose and a style all his own, James Wade delivers another powerful read. Part Western, part Southern lit, part thriller, part mystery, part character study set in rural East Texas in the 1930s, Hollow Out the Dark is a mesmerizing story, dark, raw, and original."
-- "Johnny D. Boggs, nine-time Spur Award winner "
"If John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy have a present-day successor, it must be James Wade. As intoxicating and robust as its subject matter, Hollow Out the Dark is a Prohibition-era tale that poignantly reminds us although times may change, the human spirit remains frighteningly and unflinchingly the same. Wade distills language with the artistry of an expert craftsman and the fearlessness of a bootlegger.At once heartbreaking and hopeful, this book cements Wade's growing stature as a standard-bearer of Southern-gothic literature while proving yet again that he is one of the most distinctive voices of our time."
-- "Rudy Ruiz, award-winning author of Valley of Shadows and The Border Between Us"
"In Hollow Out the Dark, James Wade casts a cold East Texas landscape in all its grim glory, reflecting the hearts of the men who battle for their piece of it. This prohibition-era Western is no simple tale of bootleggers and lawmen but a meditation on morality in which even the good must choose their own corruption. Wade imbues poetry, philosophy, and craftsmanship in his prose. From story, to scene, to sentence, his care is present in each word. A joy to read."
-- "Caroline Frost, award-winning author of The Last Verse and Shadows of Pecan Hollow"
"James Wade's newest novel, Hollow Out the Dark, is a masterpiece of atmospheric crime fiction; a worthy successor to the likes of William Gay and Cormac McCarthy. Set in East Texas, it is an epic, and age-old, story of greed and generational betrayal--where vengeance is swift and forgiveness a long time coming."
-- "Kathleen Kent, New York Times bestselling author of Black Wolf "
"With his characteristic insight and imagination, James Wade takes us to another era and makes it tremble with authenticity. The manner in which Wade sees life so clearly, even in the dark, creates a psychology of characters carefully wrought. Wade's distinctive lyricism threads the narrative and his pitch-perfect rendering of the biome of the piney woods throbs with metaphor, running through the novel like a river, clean and clear."
-- "Lucy Griffith, WILLA Literary Award-winning poet"
FIUME, CANTA ​
Longlisted per il Reading the West Book Award for Fiction
Una selezione di Barnes & Noble degli e-book indipendenti preferiti del 2021
Una scelta della rivista Deep South per la lettura estiva
​
​
Tentando di sfuggire al padre violento e a generazioni di povertà ciclica, il giovane Jonah Hargrove si unisce al misterioso fiume - un'adolescente che trasporta migliaia di dollari di metanfetamina rubata - e si imbarca in un'odissea gotica meridionale attraverso i fondali del fiume Texas orientale.
​
Sono perseguitati dal boss della droga locale, John Curtis, e dal suo assassino assassino, Dakota Cade, con il quale River aveva una relazione sentimentale. Ma Cade e Curtis hanno i loro nemici, poiché il loro rapporto con il cartello che controlla la loro fornitura di metanfetamina inizia a peggiorare.
A tenere d'occhio tutti c'è The Thin Man, un assassino silenzioso che apprezza le conseguenze piuttosto che la misericordia.
​
Ogni persona sta nascondendo i segreti degli altri -- segreti mortali che verranno smascherati in modo selvaggio quando i loro percorsi finali si scontrano e tutti sono costretti a venire a patti con le proprie scelte, le proprie circostanze e la propria definizione di Dio.
​
Con un cast colorato di personaggi secondari e una violenza incrollabile giustapposta alla prosa lirica, River, Sing Out si tuffa in un mondo sinistro e sanguinario, dove la povertà opprimente si contrappone al bisogno di credere in qualcosa di più grande di sé.
"Beasts of the Earth is a leanly structured western, stripping the genre only to its most basic elements. This allows Wade’s prose and philosophical ideas room to shine...a powerful ode to dreaming, beauty and human goodness."
-- Deep South Magazine
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"Wade returns with another stark and chilling tale...From reptiles in the swamp hunting prey, to reptilian men, cold and calculating, beasts feature in this disturbing novel...The prose is beautiful."
-- Library Journal
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"Wade's pitch-perfect, personality-driven dialogue sings in the voice of life, and his ability to meld existential thought, situational metaphor, and cinematic setting is a full-bodied experience...A soul-deep exploration of a wounded man in crisis, James Wade's Beasts of the Earth...secures his position as an author of extraordinary merit."
-- New York Journal of Books
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"...contemplative character development and evocative descriptions of the landscape..."
-- Publishers Weekly
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"The story brilliantly weaves together an ephemeral whodunnit with a transcendental puzzle about god and death. James Wade is a master of blending plots in this manner, and this his third novel is a masterpiece. Wade's prose is lyrical, telling a story with a three part harmony of action, metaphor and imagery. The novel's plot is a haunting ballad of evil and an atonement that is as fleeting as it is obscure...All of Wade's language in Beasts of the Earth is melodious, playing on each page a song that grips a reader's heart and soul...The anticipation makes it impossible to stop turning pages until the end. But there is no "needlessly shocking" conclusion, as one misguided reviewer suggests. For the novel's appropriate closing, the story's music just fades away, leaving it to the reader to decide, in true literary form, the reckoning. Few modern novelists have Wade's literary agility, and Beasts of the Earth will certainly delight sophisticated readers."
-- Midwest Book Review
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"All Things Left Wild was one of my favorite novels of the last two years, as was River, Sing Out. But neither of those novels could have prepared me for the dark and compelling vision of Beasts of the Earth. I found myself rooting for the characters throughout their near-Biblical tribulations, and the storyline kept me turning the pages, desperate to find out what would happen next. Here we have a novel that blends realism with existentialist philosophy to redefine contemporary Southern fiction. Don't miss this tour de force of modern literature."
-- David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Spur and Anthony Award-winning author of Winter Counts
"Like Flannery O'Connor, James Wade explores what it means to be human--our capacity for good rivaled only by our capacity for evil, our weakness alongside our urge for redemption and grace--with gloriously complex characters and gorgeous prose. Beasts of the Earth is a beautiful gut-punch of a novel."
-- Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas
"James Wade is a writer of exceptional talent and this novel is his latest entry toward his path to greatness."
-- Scott Semegran, award-winning author of The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island and host of Austin Liti Limits
"James Wade writes a terrific story, but that isn't what makes him so good. Wade is a craftsman. His books should be read slowly, to luxuriate in his word choices, his sentence structure, his character revelation. That is why he is a joy to read."
-- James L. Haley, Spur Award-winning author of the Bliven Putnam Naval Adventures
"James Wade's Beasts of the Earth delivers on the promise of his first two novels with this scorched-earth tale of a solitary innocent struggling against the unrelenting misery of a rural community in the American South who believe him to be a degenerate criminal. Reminiscent of early McCarthy, Larry Brown, or the great Tom Franklin, Wade uses two timelines to weave this intricate story that culminates in a most satisfying crescendo of honor, violence, and the only kind of justice some folks ever get. It's his depictions of noble suffering that strike deepest--I'll be thinking about young Michael Fischer, a boy struggling to hold together that last fragments of his humanity, for a long time. James Wade has all the tools, imagination, and more than enough passion to be at the vanguard of the best Grit-Lit writers of his generation, and I'll be reading whatever he puts out."
-- Matt Bondurant, bestselling author of Oleander City and Lawless
FIUME, CANTA ​
Longlisted per il Reading the West Book Award for Fiction
Una selezione di Barnes & Noble degli e-book indipendenti preferiti del 2021
Una scelta della rivista Deep South per la lettura estiva
​
​
Tentando di sfuggire al padre violento e a generazioni di povertà ciclica, il giovane Jonah Hargrove si unisce al misterioso fiume - un'adolescente che trasporta migliaia di dollari di metanfetamina rubata - e si imbarca in un'odissea gotica meridionale attraverso i fondali del fiume Texas orientale.
​
Sono perseguitati dal boss della droga locale, John Curtis, e dal suo assassino assassino, Dakota Cade, con il quale River aveva una relazione sentimentale. Ma Cade e Curtis hanno i loro nemici, poiché il loro rapporto con il cartello che controlla la loro fornitura di metanfetamina inizia a peggiorare.
A tenere d'occhio tutti c'è The Thin Man, un assassino silenzioso che apprezza le conseguenze piuttosto che la misericordia.
​
Ogni persona sta nascondendo i segreti degli altri -- segreti mortali che verranno smascherati in modo selvaggio quando i loro percorsi finali si scontrano e tutti sono costretti a venire a patti con le proprie scelte, le proprie circostanze e la propria definizione di Dio.
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Con un cast colorato di personaggi secondari e una violenza incrollabile giustapposta alla prosa lirica, River, Sing Out si tuffa in un mondo sinistro e sanguinario, dove la povertà opprimente si contrappone al bisogno di credere in qualcosa di più grande di sé.
TUTTE LE COSE LASCIATE SELVAGGI
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Vincitore dello Spur Award 2021 dei Western Writers of America per il miglior romanzo storico
Vincitore del 2021 Reading the West Award per la migliore narrativa d'esordio
Un Mayor's Book Club di Austin, Texas, Selezione
Una selezione di Barnes & Noble dei migliori eBook indipendenti del 2020
Una scelta PopSugar di avvincenti libri di narrativa storica
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Dopo una rapina fallita, il sedicenne Caleb Bentley è in fuga con il suo meschino fratello maggiore attraverso il sud-ovest americano all'inizio del XX secolo. La bussola morale e il coraggio interiore di Caleb saranno messi alla prova mentre viaggiano su terreni accidentati e incontrano coloro che si sono ritagliati una vita lì, nel bene o nel male.
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Il ricco e libraio Randall Dawson, fuori luogo in questo paese aspro e violento, sta inseguendo a malincuore i fratelli Bentley. Con poco senso di come sopravvivere, tanto meno come vendicarsi, Randall incontra Charlotte, una donna esperta nei modi mortali della vita in Occidente. Insieme navigano negli oscuri valori della giustizia vigilante.
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Potente e suggestivo, ALL THINGS LEFT WILD è il raggiungimento della maggiore età per un uomo, un'odissea di mezza età per l'altro e un'illustrazione della violenza e della corruzione prevalenti nel nostro paese in rapida espansione. Abbozza ad arte la magnificenza del West americano che si rispecchia nell'anima umana.