Raised in New Orleans, Washington D.C., Germany, Missouri, Maryland and elsewhere, Leonce Gaiter is the quintessential army brat—rootless, restive, and disagreeable. He began writing in grade school and continued the habit through his graduation from Harvard. He moved to Los Angeles and put his disagreeability to work in the creative and business ends of the film and music industries. His nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, LA Weekly, NY Newsday, The Washington Post, Salon, and in national syndication. His short fiction has appeared in the literary magazine Archipelago. He currently lives in Northern California.
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Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 290 pages
Publisher: Legba Books (September 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0615490107
ISBN-13: 978-0615490106
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
The #4 Bestselling eBook on AALBC.com for 2012!
Download the first two chapters (44 pages) for free PDF file
"Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker; Notorious half-black, half-Indian outlaw Cherokee Bill; one-quarter Cherokee "gentlemen bandit" Henry Starr, relative of the notorious Belle Starr; and the worst of them all-half black, half Creek Indian Rufus Buck. These real-life historical figures collided during the fateful summer of 1895. In lawless Indian Territory the end of an era approached. The U.S. government continued to co-opt Indian land for settlement. Judge Isaac C. Parker's judicial tyranny over the entire 74,000 square mile Indian Territory was coming to an end. Against this background, the multi-racial, teenaged Rufus Buck Gang--the last and most notorious of the Indian Territory badmen--embarked on their vicious, childish, and deadly 13-day rampage that shocked even this lawless land. In I Dreamt I Was in Heaven, famous, historical figures dance with fictional characters to create a turn-of-the-century tapestry of violence and innocence, butchery and grace--mirroring and chafing against the backdrop of a burgeoning United States, and a disappearing American West.
Bourbon Street
ISBN: 0786714328
Format: Hardcover, 169pp
Pub. Date: December 2004
Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group
In 1958, gambler Deke Watley decides to leave the comfort and golden dust of Texas for the toxic chiaroscuro of Mardi Gras New Orleans: he smells the chance of a lifetime. It gets even better when this opportunity to win big collides with Hannah, a woman from his past-a woman he wronged-a wrong he's regretted ever since. Playing him in more ways than one is Alex Moreau, the half-black son of a notorious white racketeer. It's Alex's game, and he weaves the worst of his troubled past to create an orgy of vengeance, only to find that the other players have scores to settle, too.
Amid the noise and the frenzy of the drunken crowds, streamers flying like electric currents, bejeweled costumes glittering, Deke stumbles through this foreign, lurid town, seeking a return to the innocence he turned his back on long ago. However, time is running out and old debts must be paid before Deke-or any other hustler-leaves Bourbon Street alive. This debut novel from Leonce Gaiter combines Walter Mosley's dark brushstrokes of postwar America with the best of the grifters and petty hustlers that populate Chester Himes, bringing a fresh voice to the African-American crime novel.
Waking From King's Dream: Dispatches from the Black Culture Wars
“This is a discussion of some of the ideas
on black culture that have fascinated me over the years.”
A Memory of
Fictions (or) Just Titty-Boom - A Novel
Down Free PDF file of of Novel
A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Titty-Boom concerns a black character but is not a "black book." It concerns a gay character, but is not a "gay book." The narrative is non-linear and the techniques it employs are unusual in this context. No one has suggested it is boring. Just the opposite, in fact.
But commercial in the traditional sense or conventional in the literary sense? No.
However, I stubbornly insist on believing that the book is entertaining, even if it's not bound to be everyone's cup of tea. This being the 21st century and all, I offer it up here for the entertainment of readers online--just click the image above.
Description below. If it sounds interesting to you, I sincerely hope you enjoy:
Part memoir, part fiction (and refusing the fantasy of much difference between the two), A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Titty-Boom, uses a fugue-like structure to create a modernist take on the bildungsroman, chronicling the psychological, social and cultural coming of age of its main character, a young, black, hopelessly bourgeois, Harvard-educated gay man from the Kennedy 60s to the Reagan 80s, dealing with the contradictions all of the above imply. His past is not past but dictates his present and colors his future; and they all intertwine in this novel.
This jazzy take on the coming-of-age form uses everything from poetry, images, lyrics, and diaries to paint a portrait of Jessie Vincent Grandier, battling to reconcile his existence with expectations and preconceptions of those around him -- black and white. He shoulders the weight of his black bourgeois family’s pride and fear through the 60s and 70s, and a death that tears his world apart. If not broken, then seemingly irreparably bent, he wends his way through Harvard in the 70s, and stumbles through LA, liquor and love in the Reagan 80s. When his grandiose ambitions have abandoned him, when he’s almost beaten, and when he's a breath away from too late, he looks back and regards the jagged shards of his life. He takes the cuts and bruises as he pieces them together. A ribald, brutal and unique look at self, race, sex, and redemption the hard way.
A Memory of
Fictions (or) Just Titty-Boom
Related links
Official Website
http://www.leoncegaiter.com/
Conversation on Huffington Post Article by
Leonce Gaiter
Controversies in Black Literature Prove Book Sales Aren't Color-Blind
