Kirjahaku

A recently-widowed doctor, stunned by grief, retreats to a cabin on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. Inside she has a puppy and a stack of letters from an old lover. Outside, there's a bear. As she revisits the letters from Tom Connor, we come to see, through his eyes, the dusty, broken alleys of Central America during the war years. The two narratives taken together explore themes of life-long love, about what we can see only when we are ready to see, and how hope can grow in the darkest of places. The third in what the author sees as his "homecoming trilogy" (after Hunger in American and Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home), Tom Connor's Gift shines a light on the transformative act of storytelling itself, and is destined to be received as one of the most important novels of the year. David Allan Cates's Tom Connor's Gift is extraordinary. The prose is ravishing, the characters are surprising and irresistible, and many of its scenes are so intensely moving that they bring tears of gratitude and pleasure. The book praises long marriage and long friendship, but what I especially appreciate about its vision is how sexually liberating it is for both men and women. Cates is a fierce and fearless writer One finishes this novel feeling wiser, more alive, and spiritually refreshed. David Huddle Sadness and madness, grief and delirium. Tom Connor's Gift delivers us precious monsters: our first true love and our true lasting love. Coursing between anecdote and musing, this is a novel only grownups can understand. It is smart and ecstatic and will break your goddamn heart. Bryan Di Salvatore David Allan Cates evokes the human heart out of the landscape, blending the two with so much subtlety and skill that the very world in this novel shimmers with yearning. Tom Connor is as complex and fascinating a character as I have read in contemporary fiction, and Cates has an uncanny ability to evoke the beautiful and terrifying, the feverish and gritty Central American world Connor travels through. Tom Connor's Gift is a journey into the heart of two continents-and the continent of the human heart-an exploration of dissolution and loyalty, naivet and cynicism, grief and renewal. In this novel, they all find their place. Kent Myers Tom Connor's Gift is the gift we all seek, the gift of love in the face of grief, violence, loss, and heartbreak. In a deeply felt and vividly told story, David Cates connects the interior lives of a farm woman in the wilderness grieving her husband's death and her long-lost lover-a wandering man torn by the beauties and terrors of Central America. Annick Smith Tom Connor's Gift is a fearless and instructive odyssey into the rustic places of the heart that still baffle and dictate our lives. Rick DeMarinis Tom Connor's Gift is a gift all right-hilarious and moving-a two for one: two voices, two stories, two struggles to come to terms with love and longing, in prose that is vivid, urgent, brave, and true. Dinah Lenney Put a widow in a cabin at the edge of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front with nothing but memories and a marauding bear outside to keep her company and what do you get? A tenderly-told tale of grief, recovery, and a message of love from the past. David Allan Cates's Tom Connor's Gift is indeed a gift to readers looking for a novel that will ask them to slow down and think about questions like "How do we endure suffering? And how-when life has flung us far and wide-how do we get home again?" David Abrams Tom Connor's Gift is a wonderful book, standing on its tiptoes, stretching out its fingers to brush against a magical realism that is transformative. Mark Metcalf

A GOLD MEDALIST FOR BEST FICTION IN THE 2013 INDEPENDENT BOOK PUBLISHERS BOOK AWARDS 'Your brother forgives you, ' Ben Armstrong is told by his mother's ghost, 'Don't waste that, ' and so the hero of this novel begins his long journey home. What follows is a wild ride through the subconscious--a night journey toward redemption and grace. It's amusing and hilarious and weird, and unlike any homecoming story you've ever read before... "...a deliberately troubling masterpiece... Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home begins with an all-American homecoming that traps its middle-aged ex-farmboy protagonist like a fly in a web worthy of Kafka. Cates' hero endures an inescapable series of dreams, visitations, half-melted memories, and unsought meetings with the living and dead. His subsequent attempts to escape -- or even understand his entrapment -- proceed to make a mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind music I've heard nowhere else in our literature. Endlessly inventive in its language, masterful in its fidelity to its own harsh vision, and symphonic in its impact, this novel builds from a series of perverse fractions to a darkly satisfying whole." --DAVID JAMES DUNCAN, author of The Brother's K and The River Why "I love this book. I picked it up in Montana on a road trip to Minnesota. It carried me along in its backdraft and my imagination was completely engaged for a thousand miles. I like to think about the images and replay the feelings they roused: erotic, startled, awakened." --Sheryl Noethe, author of AS IS, and Montana Poet Laureate "David Allan Cates ignites a new vision of Cain and Abel. Invitingly mysterious and breathtakingly compelling-the story takes on the shape of a rattling tale. Although the story is dreamlike, it does not stall or coerce like a dream-it opens out to mythic possibilities, the strange truths of life. There is a deep hunger for literature that expresses desire and fear with fearlessness and David Allan Cates is on that cutting edge. Wonderful-an Alice in Wonderland journey for grown-ups." -DEBRA MAGPIE EARLING, author of Perma Red "David Allan Cates may take you places you've never been, have never imagined going-to a dead brother slowly turning into a fish on your staircase landing, say, or into the fields around your house only to find a ghost troop of Union soldiers encamped there-but his great knowledge of the deep workings of the human heart serves as an unerring guide wherever his story lead. This is a deeply moving work by an uncannily gifted writer." --PETE FROMM, author of Indian Creek Chronicles, and How all this Started

Because he is an exceptionally alive human being, David Allan Cates is a one-of-a-kind poet. The pieces of his Valentine's Day in the Mummy Museum are smart, witty, wise, candid, original, brave, affectionate, imaginative, bold, knowledgeable about the world, and utterly unpretentious. The best love poems I've read in years are in this book-"On a Cliff with You" and "The Purpose of Kissing." -David Huddle, author of My Surly Heart, Dream Sender, and Blacksnake at the Family ReunionEven at his most smart-allecky, Tony Hoagland always held the world open to the messy certitude of his love. David Allan Cates, with VALENTINE'S DAY IN THE MUMMY MUSEUM, is the new bearer of that deeply American affection. Cates' rough and aching poems are sometimes funny, never smug, and always capable of breaking your heart. Whether bright missives constructed in the beautiful unease of Latin America, or raised in view of the back door of his home in Montana, Cates' understated poems want so dearly to connect to the ineffable, even when they know it's impossible, yet go on singing anyway. "Have you written/the lives you love?" Cates asks. Thankfully for us, the answer is yes. -Christopher Locke, author of WAITING FOR GRACE & OTHER POEMS and TRESPASSERSThe poems in David Cates' book are valentines, in truth, to the liminal state of being alive. "We invent so we don't fall off the lobe of now," he writes. And "There's a moment when it could go either way." Every single poem in this collection lives in that dream-like place where the heart must go when it's grappling with loss, sorrow, and the complexities of love. Every poem remains poised in that iridescent moment. These are rich and sometimes funny poems from a skillful writer who refuses to be embittered, whose mind is forever climbing the ladder of the imagination, never knowing what might happen next. -Fleda Brown, author of FLYING THROUGH A HOLE IN THE STORM and THE WOODS ARE ON FIRE

These early stories by the award-winning novelist, David Allan Cates, take place in Mexico and Central America during the war years of the 1980s. The protagonists are exiled lovers-broken for the most part and trying to make sense of their new world of grief. Far from home and working in a boatyard, on a movie set, a banana freighter, as a veal salesman, medical interpreter, writer, and Sandinista volunteer, they're forced to re-imagine not only love, peace, suffering, and beauty but the meaning of their very own lives. "The stories in David Allan Cates's Imagining Tanya, sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, are always moving. Like his novels, they're the perfect mixture of tough and tender, full of heart, mystery, and wisdom. But the compressed form allows him to focus on the strange, subtle moments that turn a life upside down or right it again, even if his characters don't always recognize the change when it comes. In these rich pages, a host of American ex-pats wandering in Central America-some innocent, some jaded-all carry with them the potential for an earthly, messy sort of grace, gifted to them by a masterful storyteller." - Scott Nadelson, author of One of Us and The Next Scott Nadelson "David Allan Cates creates a vivid, unforgettable world of souls lost in Central America in the 1980s. The characters' heartbreak and displacement are mirrored by the larger conflicts of war all around them, and they seek redemption in the bravery of loving through pain. Imagining Tanya is a bold, gripping, and seductive collection, full of moments of grace." - Maxim Loskutoff, author of Ruthie Fear and Come West and See

These early stories by the award-winning novelist, David Allan Cates, take place in Mexico and Central America during the war years of the 1980s. The protagonists are exiled lovers-broken for the most part and trying to make sense of their new world of grief. Far from home and working in a boatyard, on a movie set, a banana freighter, as a veal salesman, medical interpreter, writer, and Sandinista volunteer, they're forced to re-imagine not only love, peace, suffering, and beauty but the meaning of their very own lives. "The stories in David Allan Cates's Imagining Tanya, sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, are always moving. Like his novels, they're the perfect mixture of tough and tender, full of heart, mystery, and wisdom. But the compressed form allows him to focus on the strange, subtle moments that turn a life upside down or right it again, even if his characters don't always recognize the change when it comes. In these rich pages, a host of American ex-pats wandering in Central America-some innocent, some jaded-all carry with them the potential for an earthly, messy sort of grace, gifted to them by a masterful storyteller." - Scott Nadelson, author of One of Us and The Next Scott Nadelson "David Allan Cates creates a vivid, unforgettable world of souls lost in Central America in the 1980s. The characters' heartbreak and displacement are mirrored by the larger conflicts of war all around them, and they seek redemption in the bravery of loving through pain. Imagining Tanya is a bold, gripping, and seductive collection, full of moments of grace." - Maxim Loskutoff, author of Ruthie Fear and Come West and See