Coffeetown Press is proud to announce the release of The Deification ($16.95, 358 pp, 6x9 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60381-134-7), a picaresque novel by Seattle author Jack Remick that pays homage to the legendary San Francisco beat poets. Some of Remick’s influences include Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.Writes author Robert J. Ray, “The language, the timing, the humor, the strong verbs, the concrete nouns, the world beneath the world–all wrapped up in one novel ...You gotta read this book!”
Remick’s novel, Blood (Camel Press, 2011), earned extravagant praise:
Wayne Gunn wrote on LambdaLiterary.org: “For an author to choose as his explicit models Camus, Genet, and de Sade ... and to earn the right to be mentioned in their company is [a goal] that perhaps Jack Remick has indeed achieved.”
The San Francisco Book Review wrote that Blood is “one of the best books I’ve ever read.”
Author Priscilla Long calls Remick “the Jean Genet of the 21st Century.”
To be a writer in America, you have to bleed. Eddie Iturbi, a young car-thief obsessed with the dark magic of Beat culture in a mythic San Francisco, sets off on a spaced-out crusade to connect with the Beat gods. En route Eddie links up with living legend Leo Franchetti, the last of the Beat poets. Leo sends Eddie to the Buzzard Cult, where a mysterious mentor reveals the writer’s ritual of blood and words. Changed and invigorated and back in the City, Eddie falls in love with a snake dancer at the Feathered Serpent. She can’t save him from Scarred Wanda, jealous bad-girl of literature, whose goal is to destroy Eddie before Jack Kerouac relays all the magical secrets of the literary universe. Immortality is just a book away. Will Eddie live long enough to write it?
Says Remick, “I grew up in California’s Central Valley. The Valley was huge but stifling. If you climbed the water tower one foggy night and the cops hauled you down, it made the local newspaper. Your one goal was a customized car with a flame job and flipper hubcaps. You wore Levis or Chinos and you cut your hair short. And then along came Jack Kerouac and On The Road. Right behind him came William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg .... On The Road and the Beatniks set me free. Get out of the Valley, they said. Go find your America. And some of us did. .... This novel, The Deification, pays homage to those wild men whose vision of the world opened up the social revolution of the 1960s. They changed everything.”
Jack Remick is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. The Deification is the first book of a series, The California Quartet. More volumes will be released by Coffeetown Press in 2012: Valley Boy, The Book of Changes, and Trio of Lost Souls. Blood, A Novel was published by Camel Press in 2011. Also coming from Coffeetown in 2012: Gabriela and the Widow. You can find Jack online at blood.camelpress.com.
The Deification is available on Amazon.com, the European Amazons, and Amazon Japan. The Kindle edition retails for $5.95. Other eBook versions can be purchased on Smashwords and through most major eBook retailers. Wholesale orders can be placed through info@coffeetownpress.com, Baker & Taylor or Ingram. Libraries can also purchase books through Follett Library Resources or Midwest Library Services.
ABOUT Coffeetown Press—Based in Seattle, Washington, Coffeetown Press has been publishing the finest fiction and nonfiction since 2005.