Böcker av Joe Taylor

An Excerpt: Some decades back, a Quaker named Richard Millhouse Nixonwrote a book entitled Six Crises. An opposition psychiatrist wasquick to pick up on this title and note that President Nixon saw hislife in typically manic-depressive fashion. Psychiatry and politics andreligion aside, I suspect many of us perceive our lives just as that past-President did: if not in crises, at least in watersheds where we chooseone muddy river path over another; then fall onto or avoid a sunningcottonmouth; where we either sadly stumble over or gladly hop overthe mighty snag of regret.So what did Josey learn from Mr. Garner's visit and thoseuntimely deaths? I'd like to say-my friend, I'd truly like to say-that he absorbed a myriad of lessons. But he's forever been unable toassimilate even a damned comic book moral, much less true epiphany'sinspiration. In consequence he views himself not as a higher spiritualbeing, not even as a genetically select, silken white rat capable ofconquering life's mazes, but rather as the world's thinnest fat man, continually stunning crowds below by tossing off some dazzling jewel. . .

Many of these stories-most especially "The Man Who Haunted Himself" and the title story-were inspired by dream visions. I try to take such visions and search for the human truth concealed within, working within a framework of verisimilitude. While I partially envy the creating of "realistic" fiction, I'm typically happy to write in the romantic mode. Um, gee, Vonnegut, Emily Bronte, and Laurence Sterne strike me as worthy of emulation. Nonetheless, several other stories in this collection ("Soft Queen," "Ontological," and "All Lovely") were originally intended for a novel of linked stories that basically aimed toward an admixture of psychological/love/detective realism. For the sake of that novel's plot progression the three were trimmed, to be included herewith. And then the stories "Breakdown Club" and "The Secret Life of Atheists" from whence? The latter came from my youthful infatuation with Sartre and Camus. Why not, I figured, toss in some wine and Simone DuBeauvoir? And what of "Breakdown Club"? The junction of a trip to the zoo and my year and a half apprenticeship as a concrete finisher brought that one about. No matter the inspiration, I do think that all these stories offer a vision of life that comes across a bit skewed. And what life doesn't offer that jaunty description, in the end?

Joe grew up at a time when many people still considered Italians, the "other", not quite real Americans. His mother bought a house in a predominantly non-ethnic neighborhood. He attended school with kids whose last name didn't end in a vowel.Snapshots of growing up in the 50s an Italian boy in a non-ethnic neighborhood and school, while living life with, and loving his very traditional Italian relatives. Traversing two very different worlds. Joe lived the other part of his life surrounded by his relatives, mainland Italians on his mother's side, Sicilians on his father's. He grew up loving them, especially their food. Yet, he felt slightly estranged from them, not as demonstrative, more reserved, assimilated.He learned to traverse and translate the two worlds he grew up in. In "A Pepper and Egg Sandwich on American Bread" he looks internally at his Italian upbringing from both the perspective of the love of family as well as the detachment of a curious outsider.The recollections in this book were written with affection, respect, humor, and humanity.

Preacher is not a preacher, though death's vicissitudes clamor around him in a disturbingly ecclesiastic manner. When he finds a pit bull puppy by the side of the road and gets a job at a boxing manufacturer, he declares his luck changed. One small-town cop has doubts: "It ain't your luck needs changing, but the folks you meet." And so it stands, as the sun and moon revolve in their tango-or is it a waltz?-and whisper to one another.

The author's first collection. As the title promises, these stories range from a small town sheriff who rids his town of a drunken murderer in his own way (after discussing the matter with a local mountain), to woman who on the gad dyes her hair with a teen-ager's piurple streak to wait on staid lawyers and judges in an up-and-coming restaurant, to a priest who-yes-slips right into current headlines of sexual child abuse in a moment of terrifying lonelines and confusion. But just as the title shifts from magnificent to commonplace, so do the characters. And Taylor reminds that we all-despite our flashes into one glorious or ignoble end of life's spectrum-that we all muddle along in life's ragged gray.

Fiction. Everyone is constantly admonishing our narrator to keep quiet: You're full of bull hockey, college boy...Shut up and drink your beer. Or, 'Shut up, ' Michelle replied. 'Shut up, ' Michelle repeated. Or, Don't look up. At least don't shout anything when you do. She's here, on the balcony. Or, 'Shit.' Sarah spit this out like a too-hot cinnamon ball, pulled me off the dental chair, and led me to the closet with the skeleton, shushing me with her fingers. Or, Hush, be still. Tacete, tacete. Everyone admonishes him, when all he wants to do is shout the wonders, the horrors, the terrors that he and his older adoptive brother Galen face as one spiritual incursion after another manifests in their lives, moving from trickster poltergeists to forlornly wandering ghosts to intent fetches to avenging revenants. Perhaps, instead of admonishing him, everyone would do better to heed his early, youthful deliberation: I never heard his voice again after that night. If we humans could always recognize the last words we were ever to hear from each person we knew or even met, our lives would perch as fragile indeed, gathering tragedy every listening moment to lean over a dark cellar, of dark farewell