Hastings House & Us

In Broken Wigwag

IN BROKEN WIGWAG

Suchi Asano

"This is the story of a deeply sensitive person teased and tortured by the hard surface of America today. It is told in a new-born language, crippled and beautiful." — Iggy Pop

Are they emigrants or exiles, these young Japanese in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side of New York? The ones who love Jazz and buy their vintage clothes on the streets between Avenue A and 1st Avenue and speak in Broken Wigwag, their very own version of English. Is Tompkins Square Park a sanctuary from what they perceived as a stultifying Tokyo, the place where their lives had been neatly laid out for them, much too neatly?

With the appearance of IN BROKEN WIGWAG a charismatic new subculture has come into view. Its idiom strikes us as both foreign and unmistakably American at the same time.

Rosset-Morgan

ISBN: 0-8038-9404-X

Paperback, $12.95

Pullers

PULLERS

A Novel

Tom Graves

Explains to us things about professional arm-wrestling — the techniques used to psych-out opponents, the sleazy settings for the contests themselves, the broken wrists, the compund fractures — we could never find out on our own without spending lots of time at interstate truck stops and the back rooms of unsavory beer joints along the back roads.

Hastings House

ISBN 0-8038-9424-4

$21.00, hc

Watching

WATCHING

John Fergus Ryan

Dark humor just got darker. Watching is the highest achievement to date of an acknowledged Mamphis master, John Fergus Ryan. Set in Times Square and Halle's Kitchen rather than the South, it represents a stark departure from the author's usual humor. Watching is an ode to life-as-lived; bleak, funny, and devastating.

Watching begins as a matter-of-fact descriptive accounr of the sleaze palaces around Times Square, and gathers force page by page, building to a torrent of redemptive poetry — from bleak materials!

Rosset-Morgan

ISBN: 0-8038-9398-1

Hardcover, $22.00

Power Game

POWER GAME

Perry Henzell

Creator of The Harder They Come

From the author, director, and producer of the cult film, The Harder They Come — which helped to create the market for reggae music in this country 25 years ago — comes the definitive insider novel of Caribbean politics, a hip roman à clef of an easily identifiable island. Henzell, a "first citizen" of Jamaica, has bared its hidden power struggles, drawing on his intimate knowledge of all the players. Against a background of music, sex, and gang war, the contestants keep their eye on the bottom line: the price of oil, the price of bauxite, the price of ganja. It is by manipulating these prices that the destinies of the many are decided by a handful of key figures. Mike Bernard controls the army. Winston Bernard controls the banks. Michelle controls the media. Zack controls the streets. Eddie controls the cash in the ganja trade. Each believes that when the crucial moment comes, he — or she — will prevail.

Rosset-Morgan

ISBN: 0-8038-9402-3

Hardbound, $27.95