Feast your eyes! Pretty slick, no? Better than I deserve! And the spatial, three-dimensional novel may look better still, even with cover text and ISBN bar code.
(I pause to lovingly heft the paperback that now graces my computer desk, to fan its crisp pages, inhale that dreamy new book smell. And you thought I couldn’t write promotional copy!)
I remember artist Larry Welz as one of the majors of the Vietnam-era underground comix movement, still own the first edition of Bakersfield Kountry Komix, Larry’s paean to his San Joaquin Valley home town. My great American novel has been a fait accompli for eight years, but I yearned for a quality cover illustration.
I contacted Larry. The rest, as they say, is history.
A 2013 post best explains this novel’s reason for being. I felt too old for my own story when I rewrote it almost a decade ago, admit to feeling still more separate from it now, as an expat Madrid subway rider. All the same:
I think it holds up as an entertainment offering for American readers born before, say, the U.S. Bicentennial. Particularly male American readers. I waxed nostalgic about 1970s California while writing Brothers, and believe other American readers of a certain age may so wax nostalgic while reading it.
The electronic versions are free. I can’t be more generous than that, unless I pay you to read it.
I emphatically do not recommend the novel to English language learners. I take too many liberties with the language, particularly when writing in character as my novel’s protagonist. If you have wandered into this post after a Zoom chat on Inglés-Español Intercambio, I hope you will accept my apologies, and my heartfelt encouragement to wander elsewhere.