Seattle, WA.— Coffeetown Press is delighted to announce the release of Valley Boy ($13.95, 254 pp, 6x9 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60381-145-3), by Jack Remick, a work of literary fiction that covers a year in the life of a third-generation Okie teenager who is struggling with the stigma of his heritage. “I’m tempted to say this is Remick’s best work,” says Frank Araujo, Author of The Q Quest, A Perfect Orange, and Nekane. “The writing never lets up from the first line to the last. Ricky is the prototype Okie kid who haunted the Wasteland we know as the San Joaquin. The story is witty, tense and true.”
Of Remick’s novel, Blood (Camel Press, 2011), 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.”
Ricky Edwards lives, works, and plays in Centerville, a small California town in the middle of the Valley. Ricky has a gift for music but he’d rather fight, drink beer, chase girls, and debeak turkeys. He debeaks turkeys because he wants a Lifters Car Club jacket with red lettering on the back. He fights because his long time pal, Linard Polk, teaches him about violence, fast cars, and guns—which drives Teresa, Ricky’s hyper-religious mother, nuts. She wants Ricky to escape the legacy of his daddy, an Okie skirt chaser who abandoned the family for a honky-tonk preacher’s daughter gone bad. If Ricky can just get out of Centerville, maybe he can make his mark.
Says Remick: “When you grow up in the Central Valley you meet people who never stray much beyond their home town unless it’s to go next door to a football game. If you’re not the right caste, you learn to work with your hands and you work hard. You wonder if you can ever get out. I wrote Valley Boy in part to remind readers about the Diaspora, the Westward migration, that started in the Dust Bowl. Most people think the Migration ended with World War II, but it didn’t. In Valley Boy, the main characters are third-generation Okies who didn’t make it to the Pacific, got stuck in the dust, and were left behind in the orchards and vineyards doing the gut-busting labor that turns young boys into old men way too soon. I wanted to write about those Okie boys, like Ricky and Linard, who work and live with the bad taste of lost dreams in their mouths.
Jack Remick is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. Valley Boy is Book Two of a series, The California Quartet. More volumes will be released by Coffeetown Press in 2012: The Book of Changes and Trio of Lost Souls. The first book of the series, The Deification, was released in December of 2011. 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.
Valley Boy is available in Kindle and 5x8 trade paperback editions on Amazon.com, the European Amazons and Amazon Japan. Wholesale orders can be placed through info@coffeetownpress.com or Ingram. Libraries can also purchase books through Follett Library Resources or Midwest Library Service.
ABOUT Coffeetown Press—Based in Seattle, Washington, Coffeetown Press has been publishing the finest fiction and nonfiction since 2005.