Son of Eve & Other Tales — Melvin Litton

"From novelette to flash fiction, snippets of three novels to a final essay, from voices old and young, mixing the ethereal and actual in tales of misadventure, guilt, murder, bigotry, the thrill and angst of a one-night stand, poignant as the breath of evil or memory in ache to breathe, where common lives bleed over into wonder, horror, and the unexplained. For those who would enter and explore the recurring mysteries Eve has wrought..."“For many years, I have known Melvin Litton as a musician who plays guitar and sings to the night. But, man oh man, he writes like a beast! Son of Eve & Other Tales is not a young man’s book. It takes a lifetime to write prose so strong and unblinking to the passage of time.” —Richard Rodriguez (Pulitzer finalist for Days of Obligation & National Book Award nominee for Brown, The Last Discovery of America)“There is cinematic sudden violence, Kansas-centric tales of careworn nuclear families fierce with promise and love, forbidden darknesses of wind, longing and the chill of regret that seeps through generations. These stories come from the resurrected flatlands of Charlie Starkweather’s ghost. They remind me of the Dirty Realism of Raymond Carver and Carson McCullers, and not to wring the obvious out of a reference, Sam Shepard...” —John Macker, author of Atlas of Wolves (2019) and The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away Selected Poems, 1983-2018 (Finalist for an Arizona/New Mexico Book Award)“There’s a beauty to his language, and also a darkness that at times gives pause; a folksiness that belies the stirring volatility and complexity just beneath the surface. Some phrases stop you with their beauty and insight: ghostly, erratic, yet real as a heartbeat in pause describes a neon sign above a subterranean bar in the title story. In some ways, Litton’s work calls to mind authors as unlike as Allen Ginsberg and Jim Harrison: idiosyncratic, earthy and unearthly, gorgeous and forbidding...” —Patricia Traxler, Into the Skin (Spartan Press, 2020)