Böcker av Gary Stein

GETTING TO HEAVEN (AND OTHER MIRACLES) provides a humorous and provocative exploration of spiritual issues with poems rich in creative imagery. The poet gently uncovers the profound in common experiences such as a getting a pet, a medical procedure, relying on a GPS, and the joy of a long awaited pregnancy.

Martin T. Manton was a corrupt federal appeals court judge in New York who was convicted in 1939 and sent to prison. At the time, this was a hugely important story: Manton, a papal knight and friend of FDR, was considered the highest-ranking judge in the United States outside of the Supreme Court, and was nearly named to the high court himself. Yet his story has never been told in book-length form before, and never with the benefit of such exhaustive research.More than just a biography, Justice for Sale examines Manton's misconduct in the context of the culture of corruption and organized crime that permeated New York City during the Tammany Hall era. Scores of others-- leading corporate tycoons, Wall Street lawyers, bankers, accountants, and another federal judge, as well as a rogues' gallery of gangsters, fixers, bag men, and con men--participated in Manton's crimes. The book profiles these unscrupulous and often colorful characters as well, along with the enterprising anti-Tammany reporter and politically ambitious district attorney (future Governor Thomas E. Dewey) who brought Manton down. Justice for Sale culminates with the sensational federal prosecution and trial--held in the same courthouse where Manton once reigned--that gripped the nation and finally put this "merchant of justice" behind bars.

Gary Stein is a poet in the spirit of Blake, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. In Stein's poetry, the ideas are always in little things that touch larger things, and the world is revealed in a squirrel dying, a car being washed, a clock falling from a wall. To read poems such as "The Cremationist's Day Off," "Travels in Time," and "On My 50th Birthday" is to know you are in the presence of a poet who is a master of language. TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a magnificent book.-Miles David Moore, author of THE BEARS OF PARIS AND ROLLERCOASTERWhat tours, what shadows in what factory are here, in these haunting poems of memory, love, and legend? Stein's poems focus on the father, now a shade, a gifted, patient carver and craftsman who "knew the soul of wood" and long ago brought his young son into his workshop. The poet-son, now grown, pursues the craft of words, of story-making, of would not wood, with kindred, altered skills. And wonders and blesses, in his turn, what shadows and what skills, what callings, his own now-grown sons will now pursue.-Judith McCombs, author of THE HABIT OF FIRE: POEMS SELECTED & NEWGary Stein's TOURING THE SHADOW FACTORY is a meditation on time, memory, and loss-from the ghosts of the past to "the soft blur of [the] future." In poems both precise and masterfully understated, Stein explores the human condition of being in many times at once, carrying our childhoods with us as we age, expectant about what might be coming: "Each night the next miracle." -Maggie Smith, author of THE WELL SPEAKS OF ITS OWN POISON & GOOD BONES