“It’s like hanging in West Village bar with a gay Joseph Mitchell or Jimmy Breslin.” David Pratt, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Bob the Book
“…breathes with the intimacy of a diary and the irresistible power of an ongoing dream.” –Paul Lisicky, author of Unbuilt Projects
“Rick Bowes is a marvelous writer whose fiction captures NYC’s downtown scene like a WeeGee photo.”
Elizabeth Hand:
“In the tradition of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, not in content but in style: a remembrance of things past mixed in the alchemical chambers of the imagination. “Christopher Barzak Crawford Award winning author of One For Sorrow and of Before and After Lives.
His surprise at lasting when so many around him didn’t keeps his books honest. They never turn into “How I got clean” stories or “Redemption through art” fables or some queer mythology of survivial.
Kelly Cogswell Gay City News
“Decades of a troubled and magical life in New York are described in this fascinating fictionalized memoir. Adapting previously published stories, Bowes creates an alternate version of himself, inhabiting a world where magic might or might not be real. Ghosts appear and disappear, a runaway kills with his mind, a Lovecraftian adept returns to a deadly building to destroy an old tome, and Bowes lurks on the periphery, sometimes participating in the supernatural and sometimes only briefly touching it through others. Woven in are decades of queer New York experience, from a doomed love triangle and the Stonewall Riots through the AIDS epidemic and into a modern, more accepting, less raucous city. There is no overarching plot, but the vignettes are powerful, and Bowes the character comes across as a very real individual, surrounding himself with a host of memorable and eclectic people. Bowes the author depicts a New York at once beautiful and terrible, dangerous and glorious, where mundane life is only one step away from the supernatural.”(July)
Publishers Weekly
From the Bowery to Times Square, from The Saint to Saint Vincent’s, from Sleepy Hollow to Hoboken, Richard Bowes takes us on an eerie, bittersweet, wonderfully nostalgic tour of a slightly bygone (and very haunted!) New York, New York. It’s like hanging in West Village bar with a gay Joseph Mitchell or Jimmy Breslin. A delightful read for anyone ever captivated by Gotham, by art, by youth, or by the spirits that lurk within ever-shifting cityscapes.” — David Pratt, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Bob the Book
