Eric Miles Williamson

No one ever throws away a letter, or even a postcard. We delete emails, we throw away old tax returns, yellowed copies of divorce decrees and lawsuits. But we keep our letters and postcards. We keep them in folders, in boxes in the garage and attic. Correspondence comprises unspoken personal and family history. Decades, generations, centuries often pass before these letters become part of the weave of our lives, part of what we, and our ancestors, understand about ourselves. I have always kept every note, postcard, letter, receipt, picture, notecard, essay, school exam, report card-everything that adds up to what is shaping up to have been what was my life. When my daughter was two years old I began writing letters to her that I intended for her to read when she became an adult. These letters comprise much of this book of correspondence. They're Dead Letters, never delivered to their recipient.

I met Eric Williamson in Boulder, Colorado in 1984. We were in our early twenties and we both taught Introductory Creative Writing at the University of Colorado. We hung out in the same circles and joined other like-minded souls in late-night debates about literature and writing and philosophy and the meaning of life. Possessing a sense of unearned arrogance that comes naturally to graduate students in their early twenties, we looked forward to destinies of pre-ordained glory and success. Then we got older. Eric moved on to Houston and then Manhattan and eventually a town on the Mexican border. I moved to Syracuse and then Japan and eventually to Michigan. We would see each other from time to time in various parts of the world, but the true cement of our friendship came through our regular written correspondence. Through the years our swagger and self-importance met up with the tempering forces of actual life. Hope went to war against the realities of failed relationships and miserable jobs and poverty and alcohol and instability and despair. Getting a letter from Eric was always a momentous event. I remember delaying the gratification for hours, unsealing the envelope only when I knew I had an hour to read it and then re-read it, indulging his excessive observations and outrageous exaggerations set beside the anguished howls of genuine pain. You will never read anything like this again. Steve, 2018

East Bay Grease, Eric Miles Williamson's now classic first novel, has received worldwide acclaim as one of the great depictions of working-class America in the latter half of the 20th century. The story of T-Bird Murphy, born in the tumultuous 1960s and raised in the ghettoes of Oakland by his mother, who rides with the Hell's Angels, his father, who is an ex-convict, and the father figures who range from musicians to construction workers, East Bay Grease is a novel of dignity, honor, and courage that has been compared to the works of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. Praise for EAST BAY GREASE: "Williamson's writing becomes transcendent. His prose cuts loose in torrid rhythms that evoke the peril and exuberance of jazz." --The New York Times Book Review "A confident debut, an arresting, often harrowing read." --The London Times

Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent.From the book: ""Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads their works except for other literary authors and the professors who are evaluating their tenure and promotion folders at the colleges and universities at which they are employed, and it’s a minor miracle if a literary book from a small press sells a thousand copies. Fiction writers from wealth write about writing or they write about the ridiculous ""sufferings"" of the rich. Fiction writers from the lower classes write about the primordial filth from which they’ve physically escaped but from which they’ll never mentally be able to leave behind. Like war veterans, people who’ve fought it out in the miasma of poverty and blue- collar hell can never get the stink out of their skins, try as they may. Just like people who haven’t been to war can spot vets who have, middle-class people and the rich can spot people who’ve grown up poor, no matter what their position in life or the quality of their designer suits. Those suits just don’t fit right, and the neckties make them fidget and sweat. What the well-heeled authors and the working-class writers have in common is that they’ve been trained not to pronounce moral judgment.

Reading literary criticism can often be about as interesting as watching paint dry. Not so with the essays of Eric Miles Williamson. These essays are both erudite and explosive, thoughtful and outrageous, whether with praise or condemnation. One of the nation's most respected and feared literary critics, Williamson, in Say It Hot: Essays on American Writers Living, Dying, and Dead, collects for the first time the essays of his famed and infamous literary column, "Say It Hot," which ran monthly for two years in the French magazine Transfuge. Rounding out the collection are essays published over a twenty-year span in venues such as The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, American Book Review, Pleiades, Arkansas Review, Chelsea, and Texas Review.Say It Hot is criticism at its finest, reminiscent of the best essays of Poe, Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson. Passionate and learned, written with the verve only an accomplished novelist can bring to the page, Say It Hot is a landmark work of criticism by one of America's best novelists. Eric Miles Williamson is an exquisite boil on the ass of the aristocracy, a Baby Ruth candy bar in contemporary literature's country club swimming pool. In other words, he is a force to be reckoned with. 'Behind every artistic act is a moralizing artist, ' he decries in the book you are now holding in your hand. Not since Primo Levi has an author taken literature so seriously. Every word Williamson writes is a hymn to survival, not a bourgeois tender trap. In an era of compromise, Eric Miles Williamson refuses to toe the line. Watch and learn, dear reader, watch and learn."--Jerry Williams, author of Casino of the Sun and Admission

Novels about the blue-collar world are rare: seldom does someone near the cellar of society escape to tell the tale. Eric Miles Williamson joined the Laborers Union when he graduated from high school in 1979 and spent seven years as a gunite construction worker, witnessing atrocities that don't make the evening news. ""Two-Up"" is Williamson's fictional account of a journey through the nightmare of the American labor inferno.

Novels about the blue-collar world are rare: seldom does someone near the cellar of society escape to tell the tale. Eric Miles Williamson joined the Laborers Union when he graduated from high school in 1979 and spent seven years as a gunite construction worker, witnessing atrocities that don't make the evening news. ""Two-Up"" is Williamson's fictional account of a journey through the nightmare of the American labor inferno.

Young T-Bird Murphy seeks to gain a foothold in the turbulent and menacing world of 60s and 70s Oakland. While his mother runs with Hell's Angels bikers, T-Bird falls beneath the men's fists and favours, finds solace and hope in the slightest of rewards, and seeks to survive.