A COMING OF AGE TALE
A Literary Genre Bender About A Meta Journey Across An Alternate America
by Ruthie Ruth
Ruthie Ruth was literally born with the publication of the International IMPAC Literary Book Award nominee: GIV – The Story of a Dog and America. In that classic work, Ruthie was the aspiring writer and artist who as a teenager ran away from her middle class home and upbringing because she refused to live with and be destroyed by parents who were drug abusers, and who would not take responsibility for their actions nor try to change their destructive lifestyle. So, as a teenager, Ruthie took off on her own, traveling the country, supporting herself with odd jobs, including designing tattoos, while she worked to be a successful author/artist.
Her first book – THE TRIED AND TRUE TALES OF PHINEAS ICHABOD RATE – was born out of those years and is soon to be published by High Top Publishing.
A camera flipped on and the character standing before a blue screen to be filmed was already cool and loose and when told it was a “Go”, he completely charmed up. Came on like a triumph of attitude and essence.
“My name is Phineas Ichabod Rate,” he said. “You probably recognize my name from the title of this book. I was created by the author Ruthie Ruth. Now, let me start off by saying, if you expect a normally executed literary type book – FORGET ABOUT IT!
“As you can see, I stand about five feet seven. It’s also pretty obvious from my lengthy profile and teeth, and the fact I’m a candidate for serious electrolysis, I am from both the canine and human gene pool.”
Phineas was wearing a trenchcoat cut off below the pockets and a pair of cowboy boots with a star on the front of each.
“The trenchcoat,” he said, “is my trademark.” He showed off the raggedy artifact, slipping his hands into the pockets and shouldering up like a cocky star. Phineas actually had a type of paw, but with elongated phalanges and an opposing thumb and he was freakish fast on a laptop keyboard or iPad.
“The author and publishers asked if I would make a few introductory comments, sort of a heads up about this work, since I am one of its “shining surprises.”
Phineas reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar bill, along with a few used candy wrappers. The candy wrappers he discarded nonchalantly. He held up the single. “I didn’t have anything to write on at the time so--”
He uncrumpled the bill, then began flattening it upon the palm of his pawish hand.
He looked back at the camera. He had gotten the dollar bill pretty all straightened out. “Now…I wrote down names, titles, words…to give you a little feel for what lies in the pages ahead.”
He began to read off what he’d written on the dollar bill. “Alice in Wonderland…a road movie…Swift…Hallmark Hall of Fame…Beetlejuice…a coming of age story…Escher…satire…Gulliver’s travels. Oh, I sort of said that when I said Swift, didn’t I…A Connecticut Yankee in King A’s Court…a human drama…Monty Python…” He paused. “I think you probably already caught on we’re breaking the rules here. Think…Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief…squared.”
He held the dollar close, then even closer. He was suddenly having trouble reading, “There’s a lot more. But…I have lousy penmanship. And the bill being crumpled in my pocket. The ink bled all over Washington’s face. It’s pretty outrageous, when you think it out. The prologue of a book being written on a dollar bill. Well, wait a moment, maybe there’s a touch of--”
Another voice, a man’s voice, with a gruff, no-quarter tone cut Phineas off. “Are you out of your mind?”
Phineas looked off camera. “What…?”
“This is a prologue, not some ridiculous PhD. Now..get to it..or get edited.”
Phineas’ muzzle tweaked a bit and begrudgingly, very, very begrudgingly he said, “This book is about a journey across an alternate America to save a boy and a dog’s life.” He looked off camera with a self-serving stare. “Alright, genius. How’s that for brief and to the--”
Someone mercifully killed the camera.
PRESS RELEASE
2011 Book of the Year Award Finalists Announced
ForeWord Reviews is pleased to announce the 2011 Book of the Year Awards list of finalists. Representing more than 700 publishers, the finalists were selected from 1200 entries in 60 genre categories. These books are examples of independent publishing at its finest.
Gardens of Grief is a finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards in the Historical Fiction category.
GARDENS OF GRIEF — a brilliant, and socially important novel — is less a sequel to THE CREED OF VIOLENCE than an organic evolvement. It follows John Lourdes, an agent with the Bureau of Investigation, who is sent by the U.S. State Department to Constantinople in 1915. The Great War has begun and the British have been defeated at the Dardanelles. In Turkey the government means to see every Christian Armenian exterminated, in what will become the first genocide of World History. John Lourdes’ clandestine assignment is to help an outlaw priest named Malek get safely across the war-ravaged Ottoman Empire. The priest, hunted by the Turkish government because he is an Armenian, is a hero to his people and a political threat to the Central Powers. The novel, very much a Homeric epic, has the sweep and grandeur of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. It will be to modern literature what the great chanson THE SONG OF ROLAND was to the Middle Ages. A parabolic and visceral tale of sacrifice and martyrdom. It is not only compelling human drama, but it is also rich with detail about what truly took place in Turkey in 1915. The book is the definitive battlefield for those who say the genocide did happen, and those who say it did not. Regardless, the book presents the horror and the grandeur, in Kipling’s words, “Lest we forget.”—FA B 4 0
Boston Teran is the author of six previous novels. He has been nominated and won numerous awards including the John Creasy Award, International IMPAC Award, Book of the Year in France, Book of the Year in Japan, and Readers Digest Best First Novel of the Year. Two of his novels are being developed into major motion pictures. His fifth novel, The Creed of Violence, was bought by Universal Studios for the second highest price ever paid for an unpublished manuscript and is set to star Leonardo DiCaprio.
HIGH TOP PUBLISHING was established in California in 1990 and became the largest publisher of sports books on audio tape in the US. In 2005, the company was re-launched and in its new incarnation has included the best of literary fiction.
We are proud to announce our new line of literary fiction with the publication of four books by the author Boston Teran.
Our very first book by Teran - Giv -The Story of a Dog and America - was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for 2011 as one of the most important works of its kind in the world.
ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Awards program was established to help publishers shine an additional spotlight on their best titles and bring increased attention to librarians and booksellers of the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors. Award winners are chosen by librarians and booksellers who are on the front lines, working everyday with patrons and customers.
ForeWord is the only review trade journal devoted exclusively to books from independent houses.
An adventure-historical fiction epic. In 245 pages, the author of Gardens of Grief does what it took Leon Uris 600 plus pages to do in Exodus. The latter dealt only peripherally with the Jewish holocaust. Boston Teran deals more directly with the Armenian one.
Turkish readers and the Turkish government can tune out now if they l ke, but butchers of the Ottoman Empire not only killed millions of Armenians, they probably encouraged Hitler and his Nazi murderers to do the same to the Jews. The Turks dodged the bullet of public opinion, a fact not overlooked by the Nazi establishment. It certainly prompted them to believe that the rest of the world wouldn’t care what they did to the Jews. They were right—much of the official Western World didn’t care until U.S. troops and others started reporting what they found in the Nazi concentration camps.
The Turks have an open wound of guilt with respect to their “Armenian solution.” They have even leveraged their position in NATO to keep the U.S. government from using the words genocide, holocaust, and ethnic cleansing when describing their “Armenian solution.” Use whatever words you want, but no amount of ostrich behavior or positive spin can change what really happened. It was obscene, organized murder, a mob lynching on the scale of millions. This is the background for Boston Teran’s book. Like Exodus and other thrillers (Forsyth’s work comes to mind), the historical facts seem to meld seamlessly into the story. You don’t know where the history ends and the fiction begins. This book is easier to read and it is more profound. We see the holocaust up close and personal through the eyes of the main characters. It is not a pretty sight.
The hero is John Lourdes, the same one from the author’s Creed of Violence. That makes this book a sequel. (The blurb on the back cover says it’s less of a sequel than an organic evolvement—whatever that means. To me “sequel” has a more expansive definition, but words are like symbols in an equation—they can mean anything, especially in today’s literature.) John is Mexican-American. Much is made in the book that he is swarthy so he can pass himself off as Armenian. I don’t remember my Armenian friends as swarthy, but maybe I was just colorblind when I grew up. Also, as a Spanish speaker, I don’t particularly think of John Lourdes as being a Mexican-American name (this might be explained in Creed, which I have not read), but maybe they’ll change that in the movie (Universal has purchased film rights to both Creed and Gardens).
Lourdes is a spy. I don’t believe that word was once used to describe him, but there is no doubt that he would be at home in the CIA. Moreover, this spy story, like Creed, is about oil. Where Creed was about America’s intervention into the Mexican Revolution in 1910 for the sake of oil, Gardens is about the control of the Baku oil fields.
In the Italian community in the Bronx of 1950, Clarissa, Catholic and uneducated, dies at the hands of her husband, a small time drug dealer. Eve, his deaf and dumb daughter is threatened with the same fate. A German refugee, Fran, teaches the child how to communicate through sign, and photography. This woman, marked by the unspeakable violence of Nazi barbarism, protects Eve, channels her rebellion, and encourages her to exploit her talent. But can she protect the girl against her violent criminal father. From the 50’s to the 70’s, the fate of these women, abused by men, victims of inexplicable hatred, creates a chain of solidarity against prejudice and injustice. The Bronx, the scene of their struggle, is the epitome of America at that time. Its streets, people from various ethnic groups, illustrate the evolution of latent impulses that turn into open brutality. The advent of racism, drugs, and the corruption of power takes hold. It is no accident that Eve flourishes as a woman and as an artist when the Vietnam War threatens to divide the country, when the music takes a radical turn, and where violence is necessary in film. It is the reign of ambiguity and paradoxes and the birth of advocacy against the injustice that plagues the weak - women, disabled, African- Americans. It is also a cry of alarm: about how the world keeps turning while evil thrives with impunity.
Tenth Anniversary Celebration
Kindle edition THE WORLD EVE LEFT US
Details here
High Top Publishing
July 5, 2009
ISBN : 978 - 1 - 56703 - 055 - 6
GIV - the story of a dog and America by Boston Teran
My name is Dean Hickok, sergeant, late of the U.S. Marines. I nearly ran down a dog one night on a back road during a Kentucky rainstorm. The dog, it turned out, had been made to suffer and left to die in a crate. But his will to survive, his determination to overcome the many cruelties inflicted upon him, and the ultimate and unabated goodness that abided in him afterward, are the actual reason these pages bearing my name exist at all. I was profoundly wounded of heart and empty of purpose as I drove through the Kentucky darkness that night. I had recently returned from Iraq, the lone survivor of my squad, when my headlights bore through a sweeping rain to find him there, stumbled and fallen. Both of us being on that same road, on that night, and at that moment, was not an accidental happenstance but the poetry of fate. For as much as I saved a dogs life, he saved mine.
Tenth Anniversary Celebration Kindle edition of GIV - THE STORY OF A DOG AND AMERICA
Details here
St.Martens Minotaur
2001
ISBN 0-312-27115-8
FIRST U.K. EDITION
Macmillan
2002
ISBN 0-333-90472-9
Based on one of the most infamous cover-ups in Los Angeles history, NEVER COUNT OUT THE DEAD is a tragic masterpiece that has been reviewed as Chinatown meets MacBeth.
Award winning author Boston Teran takes us into the soul of a Mephistophelian tale about a mother who raises her daughter to be a murderess. Their target – a policeman. He is lured into the desert where he is shot and buried in a shallow grave. Fate divines he does not die. But a conspiracy is in play. His reputation is destroyed, his life ruined.
A decade later an agoraphobic columnist living a Howard Hughes life in Los Angeles high atop Mount Washington uncovers evidence during the investigation of a scandal that leads back to this long since forgotten crime. What follows is a violent study in cold calculation and the diabolic art of political crime that ends in tragedy and retribution.
This is the 10th Anniversary edition of one of the works that made Boston Teran an internationally acclaimed artist.
Tenth Anniversary Celebration
Kindle edition of NEVER COUNT OUT THE DEAD.
Details here
