Fiction+by+John+Sayles

= John Sayles (b. Sept. 28, 1950) = toc



Bio
John Thomas Sayles is an [|American] [|independent film] [|director], [|screenwriter] and [|author] .- Wikipedia

//Pride of the Bimbos// (1975)
is a novel about a midget who is a traveling baseball player who dresses in [|drag] and plays local teams. The baseball is always played without comedy and the traveling team (the Bimbos) almost always wins. As the book unfolds the reader learns about the midget named Pogo in flashbacks. At one time he was a gang leader and another he was a detective. The main current of the book seems to be unresolved and unresolvable conflicts. Throughout the book a man who is as tall as Pogo is short tries to find him to do him harm.- Wikipedia



// Union Dues // (1977)
The setting is Boston, Fall 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It's a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions. His father Hunter, who has been involved in a brave and dangerous campaign to unseat a corrupt union president in the coal miners union, leaves West Virginia to hunt for his runaway son. To make ends meet, he takes day-labor jobs in order to survive while searching for him. Living parallel lives, their destinies ultimately movingly collide in this sprawling classic of radicalism across the generations, in the vein of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Richard Price.- Barnes and Nobles



// The Anarchists Convention // (1979)
The Anarchists' Convention is his first short story collection, providing a prism of America through fifteen stories. These everyday people—a kid on the road heading west, aging political activists, a lonely woman in Boston—go about their business with humor and resilience, dealing more in possibility than fact. In the widely anthologized and O. Henry Award-winning "I-80 Nebraska," Sayles perfectly renders the image of a pill-popping trucker who has become a legend of the road.- Amazon.com

// Los Gusanos // (1991)
``Los Gusanos, or ``worms, is Fidel Castro's epithet for the Cubans who fled the island after the revolution. The story of these exiles--full of violent passions, tender memories and old vendettas--is what filmmaker/author Sayles ( Union City Dues ) endeavors to capture in this ambitious work. Given the tangled history of Cuba--``a succession of men exploiting men,'' as the narrator puts it--Sayles gamely constructs a plot to carry the reader through decades of turmoil and recrimination. Marta, a young Cuban nurse in a Miami old folks home, enlists a ragtag team of Cuban men--former terrorists, a priest, members of her family, an orderly with a penchant for guns--to prepare an assault on Cuba. Sayles's attention, however, drifts to whichever figure walks into the story, and he runs up and down the timeline from the '50s to the present with little design, the result being that no character sufficiently emerges from the roiling historical backdrop to engage the reader. Still, the book succeeds brilliantly as a series of closely observed vignettes--from comic flirtation rituals on a Miami beach to a harrowing recollection of the Bay of Pigs invasion to the lost love of a waitress in Havana; and the prose, spiced with Spanish and swaying to a Latin rhythm, works its gentle seductions. Overall, Sayles's impressive command of psychological detail and the narrative's generous spirit more than compensate for the book's structural flaws. Major ad/promo; first serial to Esquire; author tour. Publishers Weekly.

// Dillinger in Hollywood // (2004)
Though Sayles is best known as the writer/director of acclaimed independent films (Lone Star, Matewan), he's also an accomplished novelist (Union Dues, Los Gusanos).

In this engaging collection, his first in 25 years, he reminds us of his skill in shorter forms. In the title story, Son Bishop, an ex-horse wrangler and stunt man, works at a nursing home populated by the relics of Hollywood's Golden Age, one of whom claims he "usedto be" John Dillinger. "Your geriatrics and horses hold a lot in common," Bishop muses. "[T]hey're high-strung, they bite and kick sometimes, and they're none of them too big on bowel control." The more substantial and subtle "Casa de Los Babys" (the genesis of his eponymous movie?) follows a group of American women waiting to adopt babies in a Latin American city, as well as a maid at their crumbling hotel, a nurse at the orphanage and a young homeless boy who would like nothing better than to nab the women's wallets. "The Halfway Diner" finds a company of women riding a weekly bus to visit their husbands in jail and touchingly describes their esprit de corps ("The thing is," the narrator says, "we're all of us doing time"). Humor leavens the social conscience in many of these tales, and Sayles's exceptional dialogue is reason enough to appreciate this collection.-Publishers Weekly.



// A Moment in the Sun // (2011)
Though known best as a filmmaker (Eight Men Out), Sayles is also an accomplished novelist (Union Dues), whose latest will stand among the finest work on his impressive résumé. Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, the behemoth recalls E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Pynchon's Against the Day, and Dos Passos's USA trilogy, tracking mostly unconnected characters whose collective stories create a vast, kaleidoscopic panorama of the turn of the last century. Hod Brackenridge is a miner who gets swindled in the Alaskan gold rush, is strong-armed into a boxing match, and ends up on the run after his opponent dies in the ring. Diosdado, son of a Spanish diplomat, turns against his country and the United States to fight for independence in the Philippines. The most emotionally connected story line involves the black American soldiers who breeze through fighting in Cuba but get stuck in a quagmire in the Philippines while their families back home in Wilmington, N.C., endure a campaign of murder and intimidation that forces an affluent and educated black family out of their home and into poverty in New York City. Naturally, there are cameos--Mark Twain, president McKinley--and period details aplenty that help alleviate the occasional slow patches--indeed, Hod's story line loses steam toward the end--but the flaws and muck of this big, rangy novel are part of what make it so wonderful.- Publishers Weekly.