Vern Smith

Romy Schneider is, rightly, regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses in history. Her filmography spans European cinema and Hollywood, running from 1953 to 1982, the year of her tragic death at 43. Her talent, grace, beauty, and love of language lit up the silver screen over more than 60 international films. Her portrayal and delivery of sheer passion, deep emotion, and complex characters seared itself into the consciousness of cinephiles the world over and rendered her an adored cult figure. The 20 short stories assembled in this unique anthology celebrate the artistic work of Romy Schneider, paying tribute to her films, her characters, and to her as an actress and a human being. The stories capture many of the themes of her work: love, crime, death, passion, betrayal, and deceit. In bringing those themes to life on the page, Romy Lives

"Vern Smith is a phantasmatic presence hovering over hard luck debacles and muted urban theater, colloquy consisting of full-bodied gestures captured in the word, messy lives tangled at the root, twisting misshapen into bloom. He haunts the North American literary canon with a salt-of-the-earth journalist's ear for the unspoken and unspeakable. There is an uncanny violence to these selections, as if there before the fact, now willed into expression in lean, muscular, lockstep cadences that model with sobering, unsentimental reverence and radical, stethoscopic clarity the raging interiority of the North American animal/everyman/mammal. With preternatural stylistic range, Vern Smith renders the ineffable with documentary devotion. It is poetic realism with exacting, brutal command of the minimal. Nothing less than ink, pulp, and blood amalgamated with sinew and synapses." - Manuel Marrero, author of Not Yet

Crime Fiction collides with Urban Western when a dope-growing mail-order cowboy gets caught up in the war on terror in post 9/11 Detroit.

Mitchell Hosowich is pleased as a puppy with two tails that the great American rust-out has rendered parts of Detroit rural again, wild. For him, the "Green Ghetto," as the bureaucrats have come to call it, is a safe place to grow some fairly decent Detroit dope. But when two DEA agents start sniffing around his spread, only to wind up dead, Mitchell finds himself with a lot of explaining to do. Left with two stiffs, a dead dog, a shot cow, and fifty-nine missing marijuana plants, Mitchell decides not to wait around for the law to come down on him. Instead, he goes after his stolen pot, a chase that becomes a tense, and at times hilarious, cross-border road trip to nearby rural Canada. Set in a hyper post-9/11 culture, The Green Ghetto explores the universal theme of being compromised. But mostly, it is the story of how America got there from here in the war on drugs, terror, and words.