Today we’re
inviting you to join Peter Nathaniel Malae as he travels to bookstores and
literary centers reading passages from his new novel, Son of Amity. Peter has been a featured reader at Powell’s Books on
Hawthorne and Third Street Books in Salem among other bookstores.
In this new
novel by Peter, a family is caught in the crossroads of violence and loss in
the small town of Amity, Oregon. Sissy, Michael, and Pika share a run-down
house in Amity and must contend with their individual demons in a region
plagued by poverty and addiction. Peter deals with dark subjects in Son of Amity with a steady gaze that
also admits the moments of light and redemption.
Take a
(virtual) seat in the crowd as Peter reads from Son of Amity and paints a picture of the town in which his story
takes place:
“Poor, white
people lived down here. Undernourished, overfed, jobless white people.
HHS-invested white people. Gelatinous-spined, weighed down stooping from Ding
Dongs and Swanson’s TV dinners white people. For all he knew, he could have
been in the West Virginia Appalachians, the Arkansas Ozarks. Strings of spat
Cope on the lawn, rusting tractors posted up in gravelly driveways. A
trampoline with duct-taped springs and grips sitting on the fenceless divide of
shared property lines, dozens of plastic toys scattered across the yards like
miniature tornado towns post-blast, spotted beards of clumpy moss uprooting the
tiles of rooftops. The white people were out there on the dipping, slanted,
paint-chipped front porches, ass-planted on cushion-smashed chairs like toads
on a rotting log. The chronically obese and tweaker-thin were both watching him
come into their town without connection or invitation or permission, suspicious
brown man in a beanie up to no good in his beat-up truck from post-war Japan.
Fifteen miles an hour the legal cap, car show investigation of anyone entering
the town limits.”
“He wasn’t sure
how he felt about what he saw. He knew being poor, but this was a different
kind of poor, maybe even a worse kind. Seemed stagnant around here, like he was
driving through a time warp, the people sitting in their own shit. In the city,
everyone was moving on poverty. Sidestepping it, passing it on, lugging it
across a borough for deposit.”
Take a look at
our literary calendar and make sure you save the date for
his upcoming readings --Peter will be reading at the Salem, OR Book Bin on
Friday November 2 at 7 PM, and will be participating in a pop-up reading at the
Portland Art Museum during the Portland Book Festival on Saturday, November 10!
***
Peter Nathaniel Malae is is the author of the novels, Our Frail
Blood and What We Are; the story collection, Teach the Free Man; and the play, The Question. A former Steinbeck, MacDowell, Arts Council Silicon Valley, and
Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Malae lives in western Oregon.
Reviews of Son of Amity:
"From the farthest, wettest corner of war-damaged America, Peter
Nathaniel Malae brings us the story of a family bound by a shared
history of violence, and liberated by the miracle of shared mercy.
Written with immense intellect and swagger, Son of Amity imbues the street-level realities ofour times
—
in our cities, towns, prisons, and psyches
—
with the power of myth." —
Jon Raymond, author of Freebird and The Half-Life
"This is a tough, haunting, compelling book—one
that deals withour society now, with violence and poverty and identity
and the very real consequences of being in the crosshairs of war. What a
marvel the language is, too. Every sentence is carefully built. Malae
ia a powerhouse of a writer." —Pauls Toutonghi, author of Dog, Gone and Evel Knievel Days