Tom Spanbauer

Pacific Northwest fictions feature Tom Spanbauer recovering from illness under the trees on his street, Sean Davis driving for the first time, bringing his father home from a bar at 0 dark thirty, and Michael Sage Ricci finding the true nature of superheroes. Essayist David Hapgood watches his bus drift apart on the mountains of Morocco. Pacific Northwest poets include Christopher Luna, Brenda Taulbee, Coleman Stevenson, and surrealist JM Reed. Internationally, fiction and screenplay writer Pavel Lembersky tells us a love story, film scholar Janina Bocksch explores movement in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, film scholar Sergio Morera explores Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice. We round out with collages from Bosnia Hercegovina, Cross+Fikaris illustrating the history of cannabis in Australia, and poems from Russia, Morocco, Iran, Lithuania, Albania and Switzerland. Cover art by Australian watercolourist Graham Willoughby. Pan-lingual Gobshite Quarterly, where Paul Krassner meets V nus Khoury-Ghata, is my favorite source for Hungarian fiction that reads like a song ("Hogy jaj. jaj. jaj. semirol semmi fogalma nines..."). Here English language poems, short stories, and "reasoned rants" nervously traverse a dark alley, past hipster Arabs, dangerous Czechs, Spanish cantoras.... - Chris Dodge, Utne Magazine I did two books and many more multilingual magazine projects with Gobshite Quarterly. They're linguistic treasures. They're language-discoverers and -savers. Croatian, German, Serbian, English, Tagalog, Icelandic, Russian, Spanish, Bengali in my case. Being human is to speak, hear, write in languages, & Gobshite Quarterly makes the world more human. - Christoph Keller, winner of the 2020 Alemannic Literary PrizeGobshite Quarterly has been invaluable in introducing Croatian writers to the United States. Documentary, imaginative accounting, recounting, warning, horror, daily moments, textures of continuing life: writing emerging from the war, writing the world had to see. Gobshite published it, in a dizzying number of languages, and continues to do so. - Julienne Busic, Croatian writer and translatorI turn to Gobshite to discover and add to my research and study of PNW authors. It is go-to. But Gobshite Quarterly is much more than a regional journal. Gobshite's attention and curation and far-reaching includes the best international poets, broadening my horizons issue after issue. It is go-to. - Jeff Sargent, poet/reviewer Now more than ever, Gobshite's ambitious, ingenious, and unexpected multilingual publications serve as an antidote to the ever more toxic xenophobia which has been corrupting our culture since 2016. These issues persistently remind American readers that there's a larger world out there than the one they live in. - Madison Smartt Bell

The cult gay classic of the early 1990s, reissued to mark the year of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riotsBetween nights, earning his keep at Excellent, Idaho's outrageously pink whorehouse, Shed or, Duivichi-un-Dua - lives a life of drinking, talking and smoking opium stardust with his eccentric family.

1967. Rigby John Kluesener stands in the moonlight, a flower in his hair, his thumb out trying to hitch a ride on the road to San Francisco. The story of how he came to be there - of an adolescence spent on his parents' farm in Nowheresville, Idaho, of his father's misanthropy, his mother's strict Catholicism - is utterly real and totally unforgettable.

Tom Spanbauer's first novel in seven years is a love story triangle akin to The Marriage Plot and Freedom, only with a gay main character who charms gays and straights alike. I Loved You More is a rich, expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak, covering twenty-five years in the life of a striving, emotionally wounded writer. In New York, Ben forms a bond of love with his macho friend and foil, Hank. Years later in Portland, a now ill Ben falls for Ruth, who provides the care and devotion he needs, though they cannot find true happiness together. Then Hank reappears and meets Ruth, and real trouble starts. Set against a world of struggling artists, the underground sex scene of New York in the 1980s, the drab, confining Idaho of Ben's youth, and many places in between, I Loved You More is the author's most complex and wise novel to date.

During a fateful summer, 13-year-old Jake Weber witnesses the brutal murder of a Native American woman by the town banker. Jake's parents forbid him to speak of the killing or name its perpetrator, even as the woman's African American lover stands falsely accused. The crime and what follows it forever alter Jake's view of his parents and the world around him. Faraway Places won widespread praise for its vivid narrative and incantatory style, and Spanbauer displays singular skill in inhabiting the mind of a troubled adolescent boy.

In 1967, seventeen-year-old Rigby John Klusener escapes the narrow confines of his strict, religious farming family and the bigoted community in which he has grown up to hitchhike to San Francisco to discover life's mysteries and his own identity. By the author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

Vavisuttava kertomus 13-vuotiaan Jake Weberin lapsuuden lopusta. Jake kasvaa jumalanhylkäämällä seudulla Amerikan sydänmailla, kuivuvan joen varrella sijaitsevalla maatilalla. Ankaran uskonnollinen isä ja haaveissaan elävä äiti eivät tarjoa minkäänlaista vastakaikua eikä ystäviä ole mailla halmeilla, joten Jake etsii lohtua vilkkaasta mielikuvituksestaan. Eräänä päivänä Jake uhmaa isänsä käskyä pysytellä loitolla joesta, ja huoleton uintiretki saa karmean lopun: Jake joutuu brutaalin murhan silminnäkijäksi. Koska murhaaja on Jaken isän vuokraisäntä, isä käskee pojan vaieta näkemästään, minkä seurauksena surmatun naisen musta rakastaja tuomitaan syyttömänä. Murhatapauksen ruma jälkinäytös muuttaa lopullisesti Jaken kuvan vanhemmistaan ja maailmasta sekä saa hänet ymmärtämään kielletyn tiedon voiman. Symbolisesti ladatussa teoksessaan Pulitzer-palkintoehdokkaana ollut Tom Spanbauer (s. 1946, Yhdysvallat) kuvaa jäntevin vedoin sekä aikuisuuden kynnyksellä olevan nuoren pojan sielunmaisemaa että 1950-luvun Amerikan pimeitä puolia, kuten yhteisöllistä tekopyhyyttä, rasismia, mccarthyismiä ja kollektiivista vainoharhaisuutta. Spanbauerilta on suomennettu myös teos Mies joka rakastui kuuhun (Like, 1999). ”Spanbauer kertoo lyhyen, brutaalin tarinansa hienovaraisesti ja osoittaen syvää kunnioitusta sekä paikkaa että henkilöhahmojaan kohtaan. Voimallinen ja liikuttava teos on lupaava esikoisromaani.” – Publishers Weekly "Spanbauerin intensiivinen teksti imee mukaansa. Se runnoo, se silittää, se pelottaa, mutta kylmäksi se ei jätä ketään." - Seppo Turunen, Kainuun Sanomat "Spanbauer lyö taitavasti ja vähin elein niin järjestelmää kuin hallitsevia ideologioitakin. Kirjallinen pienoisveistos on siihen ihmeen osuva väline, jälki on tehokas. Romaanissa ei ole mitään liikaa, mutta sen siivet kantavat laajalle." - Matti Saurama, Demari

Tom Spanbauer is one of the most enchanting writers in America today, and In the City of Shy Hunters, his first novel in ten years, is a "rich and colorful" portrait of New York in the 1980s, told with "raw power" (David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle). Shy, afflicted with a stutter, and struggling with his sexuality, Will Parker comes to New York to escape the provincial western towns where he grew up. In New York, he finds himself surrounded for the first time by people who understand and celebrate his quirks and flaws. He also begins an unforgettable love affair with a volatile, six-foot-five African-American drag queen and performance artist named Rose. But even as he is falling in love with Rose and growing into himself, Will must watch as AIDS escalates from a rumor into a devastating tragedy. When a vicious riot erupts in a local park, Will seizes the chance to repay the city for all it has taught him, in a climax that will leave readers shaken, fulfilled, and changed. "In the City of Shy Hunters is so finely crafted ... you'll think you've been reading a modernist classic." -- Peter Kurth, Salon.com "Spanbauer's genius resides even in the asides ... teas[ing] out the genuine complexity of human love." -- Thomas McGonigle, The Washington Post Book World "Ambitious and compelling ... a mixture of the ghastly, the hilarious, and the curiously touching." -- John Hartl, The Seattle Times "In the City of Shy Hunters has the earmarks of a literary landmark ... Its importance and originality are unmistakable." -- Laura Demanski, The Baltimore Sun

In this title, the plot twists around the questions of humanity in a comic contemporary novel that portrays the trials of Shed, a half-breed, bisexual boy who works at a Victorian whorehouse in the old West.

Romaani yhdistelee harvinaislaatuisella tavalla historian ja myytin aineksia, kertoo uudesta näkökulmasta vuosisadan vaihteen vanhasta lännestä ja solmii toisiinsa ihastuttavasti vulgäärin ja runollisen aineksen. Kertoja on puoliverinen biseksuaali Duivici-un-Dua eli Vaja, joka elää ja ansaitsee toimeentulonsa idaholaisessa Excellentin kultakaupungissa. Kaupungin pormestari Ida, kaunissilmäinen ilotyttö Alma Hatch ja merkillinen puolihullu karjapaimen Dellwood Barker muodostavat vähitellen Vajalle erikoislaatuisen perheen, joka elää omaa liberaalia elämäänsä mormonienemmistöisen kaupungin puristuksessa. Mies joka rakastui kuuhun on filosofisen runollinen ja kaunis, myyttinen, karhea kertomus sukupuolisuudesta, rotuongelmista ja ihmisen suhteesta itseensä, kanssaihmisiinsä ja ympäröivään luontoon. Loistavasta jenkkikirjailijasta Wikipediassa: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Spanbauer