This is the fourth book in the Geiserts’ series on small towns which conveys the wonder and personality of everyday life in the United States.The hot, dry desert town is prone to harsh conditions, but the town is full of life and readers are witness to many cheerful happenings over the course of the year. The Geiserts have once again captured the authenticity and essence of small-town America.
DESERT TOWN is dark crime fiction for those whohave a taste for the perverse and violent. It wasmade into a major film, DESERT FURY, starringBurt Lancaster, Lizabeth Scott and Mary Astor.It's the story of seventeen year old Paula Haller's transition into womanhood as she defies her mother, Fritzi's dominance. Fritzi runs the small town of Chuckawalla including the Purple Sage casino and saloon as well as a bordello or two. Fritzi can control everything but Paula and the tension between the two is drawn as tight as a drum. The scenery includes sprawling ranches, a very much out of place colonial mansion and the vast beauty of the desert.Mix in a notorious gangster, his insanely jealous torpedo, a love triangle, the town sheriff, some weirdly eccentric characters and innuendo aplenty. Once the sun brings all these ingredients to a boil you've got the backdrop for a noir setting like no other.
Since the 1950s, Egypt has developed a dozen new towns in the desert outside of Cairo. Intended to alleviate a growing demand for housing in the capital, most have never been completed. Edited by Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, this book presents the first systematic exploration of these cities, analysing their architecture and urban form, along with their possibilities and shortcomings. Describing their condition as 'permanently emerging', the study identifies the towns' potential through a series of design scenarios which underscore the value of re-engaging with modernist town planning, in hopes that examining past failures uncovers future opportunities.
Winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction Contemporary Winner of the LA Press Club Award for Best General Nonfiction On a scorching summer day, Donald Kueck-a desert hermit who loved animals and hated civilization-gunned down beloved deputy sheriff Stephen Sorensen when he approached his trailer. As the sound of rifle fire echoed across the Mojave, Kueck vanished. In Desert Reckoning, Deanne Stillman recounts a tragic tale, delving into the hidden history of Los Angeles County and tracing the paths of two men on a collision course that could only end in the modern Wild West.
The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.
To escape his troubled past, Norman heads to the desert to lose himself in his work. He has just received a research grant to study the ghost towns and abandoned mines that litter the landscape. But when he comes across a group of desert-dwelling outcasts and is taken captive by their charismatic leader Jacoby, he is introduced to an alternative way of life: one that both repulses and mesmerizes. As he struggles to make sense of this strange new world – with its perverse and unorthodox practices – Norman begins to realize he must either yield to the ever-watchful Jacoby, or take his chances and run. Ireland’s refined and sparse style cuts through to the dark heart of the American dream in this chilling novel about the thin lines that separate the civilized from the primitive, and the living from the dead.
In 'Picture Summer on Kodak Film', a poem by two sisters echoes across Fulford's photographs, comprised of recurring motifs: time, test strips, refracted light, rainbow colour, and distortion through shadows. Characters and places are repeated in kaleidoscopic compositions throughout this vivid sequence. Though taken across the world (in Canada, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Thailand, USA and Vietnam), these photographs come together to create a singular visual language: one bright, timeless, fictional place. A place imbued with the unexpected beauty, humor and meaning, that one has come to expect from Jason Fulford.
***2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST*** Winner of the Arab American Book Award in Fiction Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction Finalist for the California Book Award Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize A Los Angeles Times bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dallas Morning News, The Guardian, Variety, and Kirkus Reviews Late one spring night in California, Driss Guerraoui—father, husband, business owner, Moroccan immigrant—is hit and killed by a speeding car. The aftermath of his death brings together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer returning to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; her mother, Maryam, who still pines for her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora’s and an Iraqi War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son’s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. As the characters—deeply divided by race, religion, and class—tell their stories, each in their own voice, connections among them emerge. Driss’s family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love—messy and unpredictable—is born. Timely, riveting, and unforgettable, The Other Americans is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.
