{"title":"Michael Gills","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"before-all-who-have-ever-seen-this-disappear-paperback","title":"Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBefore All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear\u003c\/em\u003e, Michael Gills' fifth novel, plumbs the depths of the Stepwell family tendency toward theatrical catastrophe. When Weldon Stepwell, bare-knuckled catcher for the Danville Little Johns and town florist, has his leg amputated in a wood-cutting accident, the team shows up on the hospital lawn to give blood, pray, and curse God. Mostly they gather to be with the stricken wife, daughter, and son and wait to see if their teammate will live through the night. One teammate is sent to retrieve the leg, and just what on earth do you do with such a thing? Rural Arkansas in 1950, they are men who'd just whipped Hitler and come home to play ball, volunteer firemen, rural mail carriers, the stray senator-to-be, hardware store workers, and fish farmers. Spanning three generations, they just can't seem to outrun whatever it is that stalks their periphery. Finally, an adult grandson must contend with the Stepwell business in the form of a plague that comes on them and the world from nowhere. Quarantined between a gleaming football stadium on one side of the road and the city cemetery on the other, a moment comes when they must walk out under the sun and re-commune. A story that dives as deep as you like into the abyss, then fights its way out with all the hope and grace this life allows.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67575990878431,"sku":"9781956440317","price":31.61,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/7vyRArciEx9781956440317.webp?v=1790376857"},{"product_id":"new-harmony-paperback","title":"New Harmony - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eDialing the three previous novels' tendency toward theatrical catastrophe up to 11, Michael Gills' concluding effort to the Go Love Quartet traces the Stepwell history of hurt and tragedy and loss, arriving at, if only temporarily, a fragile harmony that allows the present to be reconciled with the past. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePursued west, Edgar Paris can't outrun his past. He ends up in an Arizona jail for, \"defamation of distinguished persons as manifest at heritage sites,\" not to mention slander and assault on an officer of the peace. Joey Harvell must bring Edgar home but before they return the two will have to confront the bloody legacy of Navajo Bridge, aka John Doyle Lee Bridge which was originally named for the lone man convicted for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the single worst mass murder of whites from Manifest Destiny. \u003cbr\u003eThreading the three previous books' violence across generations, the Harvell family tries for all they're worth to make a home with roots in foreign ground, just as the ill-fated Fancher party had, and Mormons who'd retreated from Missouri, and the endless emigrants who ever walked west toward the promise of a new life. \u003cem\u003eNew Harmony\u003c\/em\u003e culminates the Quartet by trumpeting its namesake: \u003cem\u003eGo Love\u003c\/em\u003e. In a life that offers up truckloads of reasons to do the contrary, love remains the one buoy that will ever rescue us from perishing. Even if it kills us, \u003cem\u003ego love\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67576016961759,"sku":"9781947879508","price":22.97,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/A1XoX0KelK9781947879508.webp?v=1790376904"},{"product_id":"go-love-paperback","title":"Go Love - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eJosephine Stepwell Harvell is certainly not lucky in love; from Buddy Washer, the Arizona mistake, who got her pregnant and then got arrested trying to smuggle weed in the belly of a Santa Claus suit, to O.W., a truck driving brawler who pawns everything including her sewing machine to cover bets, Josephine knows that love isn't easy. Go Love's muddy relationships finally twist together amidst the weirdness of a southern funeral in Lonoke, Arkansas, a place where housewives string cottonmouth water moccasins from tree limbs to tease out rain, or to make a man impotent for cheating. Anything at all's possible in such a place. Just as the African women shout out during the funeral, go love is the command the novel's inhabitants must finally live by, even when life offers up a truckload of reasons to do the contrary. Even if it kills us-go love.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67839494619359,"sku":"9781935738169","price":21.53,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/8jW-dObwut9781935738169.webp?v=1790790740"},{"product_id":"west-paperback-5","title":"West - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWest\u003c\/em\u003e, Book three of the Go Love Quartet, closes the circle initiated when Josephine Stepwell made the star-crossed decision to head West with the outlaw husband who'd lied up one side of her heart and down the other. Now, her granddaughter, who grew up sneaking peeks at a dwarf uncle's photo and all the other Washers hidden in her father's black Bible, runs away from her Utah home to Arizona, where she meets Davey the Dwarf in a south side Tucson bar catering to washed up professional wrestlers. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere, with fellow dropout non-Mormon Jack, she is reunited with her long lost kith and kin, standing in for her father who'd long ago promised the blood father he'd never met that he'd return. Only he never did. In the mean time, grandfather Buddy'd died, was buried in a cemetery with all the rest of the Washers, and it's there the circle finally closes, with champagne and hard words at the grave side. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSteeped in the Stepwell catastrophes of love, \u003cem\u003eWest\u003c\/em\u003e interweaves the strands left hanging in the Quartet's first two novels. It offers healing and, finally, peace to those who have departed in a world of hurt.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67839866470623,"sku":"9781947879096","price":22.97,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/3f3z_ymaw19781947879096.webp?v=1790797890"},{"product_id":"bc1-paperback","title":"Bc1 - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBringing Gills' \u003cem\u003eGo Love\u003c\/em\u003e novel sequence to a fiery close, \u003cem\u003eBC\u003c\/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e\u003cem\u003e1\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/sup\u003e lays down the Harvell grudge of Mountain Meadows and aims, finally, at healing for all involved. Lara Luce Harvell has been charged with carrying her late father's prized Martin D-28, handmade in Nazareth, Pennsylvania in 1998, the same year she was born, to Mr. Edgar Paris in Dinnehotso, Arizona. Such is repayment to him for saving Joey's right index finger when it got bit off in an Arkansas fight. The resulting journey, part dynamite, revenge, and the tenderness of love, wanders into the lands of the woolly-headed Washers, a whole tribe of wandering relatives who \"...inhabited the desert, living in trailer parks from Tuba City to Las Vegas, pumping five dollars' worth of regular at a time into jalopies that overheated and ran on threadbare tires.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNot unlike the rural south where this sequence all started, Rez land on the border of Utah and Arizona is dog-eat-dog. Life offers few legal ways to get by. Whites and Indians eye each other with mistrust, and young people either move to Las Vegas or Tucson or sunny California. Or they get reduced to doing whatever it takes. Yazz Begay and Louie Washer are no exceptions. When they stumble on a stash of newly buried dynamite while spray-painting graffiti in a burial cave, what else is there to do but find a buyer, ring the big bell, and move to Hawaii to drink Mai Tais on Waikiki? But the man's ever out there sniffing them out, just like he had their mothers and fathers. High school dropouts with the taste of siphoned gas in their mouths, what else was there to do but meanness? Roll on down the highway to hell. Koyanisqatsi, the Diné called it, world out of balance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67915574870239,"sku":"9781963695519","price":24.79,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/3SnGtlBJcG9781963695519.webp?v=1791021202"},{"product_id":"white-indians-paperback","title":"White Indians - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this book of creative non-fiction essays Gills tells us stories from his life. The title piece, \"White Indians,\" is a \"visionary memoir\" that recounts Gills' experience as a participant at a Native American Sundance ceremony on Zuni Territory, New Mexico during July 2005. The ceremony unfolds on a wolf refuge and at night, tending fire, the howling is startling music that informs this text throughout. Sixty men and women dance and pierce themselves during four days, offering flesh to a ninety-feet tall cottonwood, wrapped and glimmering with thousands upon thousands of prayer ties. The breathtaking pageantry of the dance is offset by the shock of seeing flesh offerings taken in the splendor of elaborate costumes and the continuous drumbeat and singing under an enormous sky. As firekeeper, the narrator is responsible for heating stones for the sacred inipi. Later in the dance, a scarred old heyoka (backward\/forward man) ushers him into the arena where for some time he moves among the dancers under the tree. His perspective is an insider's, riveted by every detail. The result is the first of a two-book work, seldom if ever seen in American Literature, that places this ceremony in the larger context of Native American prophecy-the return of lost white brother, and the end of the fourth world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67948093571295,"sku":"9781935738312","price":20.09,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/wQEW2pZVlL9781935738312.webp?v=1791546679"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/michael-gills.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}