"Set in the blighted industrial landscape of the Los Angeles basin, Dreamland Court is a love story. Johnny Dalton, just released from prison, returns home to find his wife Jackie, the mother of his two small children, passionately involved with one of his friends. Determind to do everything in his power to win her back, Johnny blunders his way through one criminal enterprise after another. When the cops pick him up for being the only adult present at a wild teenage party, he’s sent back to jail. The strange thing is, Jackie finds Johnny's antics exciting, even irresistible. Reminiscent of the pathos in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the comedy of John Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Dale Herd focuses his astute gaze on lives that are ordinarily invisible, while turning the conventional love story on its head."--
Set in the blighted industrial landscape of the Los Angeles basin, Dreamland Court is an underground love story. Just out of prison, Johnny Dalton returns home to find his wife Jackie, the mother of his two small children, passionately involved with one of his good friends. Doing everything in his power to win her back, Johnny blunders his way through one criminal enterprise after another. When the cops pick him up for being the only adult present at a wild teenage party, he’s sent back to jail. The strange thing is, as far as Jackie is concerned, Johnny’s maneuvers actually work. Reminiscent of the pathos in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the comedy of John Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Dale Herd focuses his astute gaze on lives that are ordinarily invisible, while turning the conventional love story on its head. “...and I like Dale Herd for prose.” Allen Ginsberg, Poetry Flash “No one writes American better than Dale Herd. His writing is like some bastard offspring of a liaison between Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion—unflinching and streetwise as Bukowski, but with Joan Didion ’s unfailing clarity and intelligence.” Lewis MacAdams, Wet Magazine, a Journal of the Avant-Garde “Herd has an acute sense of what people say as against what they mean. This creates the tension in the prose: that something emotionally unbearable is being spilled out into completely bearable talk.” Keith Abbott, on Wild Cherries, San Francisco Review of Books “Known for his brilliant short prose pieces as published in the books, Early Morning Wind, Wild Cherries, Diamonds, and Empty Pockets, Dale Herd is a meticulous recorder of the language we move around in, and he possesses the skill and guts to take it all the way. His underground novel Dreamland Court is simply a masterpiece.” Kevin Opstedal, Blue Press Books
In a strange realm, Roan was the strangest of all -- because he always looked the same: normal. Dreamland was the place where sleepers in the "real" world went when they dreamed, and the permanent residents might change their form without warning. In dreams, there's nothing unusual about talking to a giant rabbit who suddenly turns into a living fire hydrant without missing a beat in the conversation. But Roan was always...Roan. And that was very bizarre. But something sinister is going on in Dreamland. Their constantly changing world is created by the Seven Sleepers, and will continue to exist so long as at least one of the Sleepers is asleep and dreaming. Now someone is out to destroy Dreamland by eliminating them. And unless the nightmare plot is foiled, Dreamland and its inhabitants will vanish like a blown-out candle flame, bringing an end to all dreams.... At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
A compelling dual-narrated tale from Jennifer Latham that questions how far we've come with race relations. Some bodies won't stay buried. Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what's right the night Tulsa burns. Through intricately interwoven alternating perspectives, Jennifer Latham's lightning-paced page-turner brings the Tulsa race riot of 1921 to blazing life and raises important questions about the complex state of US race relations--both yesterday and today.
An engrossing examination of the science behind the little-known world of sleep. Like many of us, journalist David K. Randall never gave sleep much thought. That is, until he began sleepwalking. One midnight crash into a hallway wall sent him on an investigation into the strange science of sleep. In Dreamland, Randall explores the research that is investigating those dark hours that make up nearly a third of our lives. Taking readers from military battlefields to children’s bedrooms, Dreamland shows that sleep isn't as simple as it seems. Why did the results of one sleep study change the bookmakers’ odds for certain Monday Night Football games? Do women sleep differently than men? And if you happen to kill someone while you are sleepwalking, does that count as murder? This book is a tour of the often odd, sometimes disturbing, and always fascinating things that go on in the peculiar world of sleep. You’ll never look at your pillow the same way again.
