Snaketown - Softcover

Wakefield, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880834855 ISBN 13: 9781880834855

Publisher: Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 2010

Synopsis

Fiction. Winner of the 2007 Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Contest Selected by Steve Lattimore. SNAKETOWN tells of a place that captivates and holds hostage, a place hermitic and congenital like the families that populate it. It tells the story of heredity and tragedy; how evil can magnetize as mightily as beauty, how a family, nostalgic for past times--devastating times--can revise damaging, damning memory; how the familiar should never be trusted.

About this title

About the Author

Kathleen Wakefield is a lyricist who began her songwriting career at Motown Records. She has worked in film and television with composers that include Academy Award winners Michel Colombier, Vangelis, and Gabriel Yared. Her stories have appeared in such journals as The Alaska Quarterly, Black River Review, The New Press, Salmagundi, Tabula Rasa, and West Branch. She lives in Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest, where she is working on another novella, and a play in two acts.

Review

Kathleen Wakefield's imagination constructed a minefield of malady when she wrote Snaketown. Snaketown's soil has been raped by the mining industry and infected by a contagious soul sickness, which has spread to its inbred and insular community. Here is a morality tale of darkness and decline told in brilliant lyrical detail, biblically enchanting. --Martine Bellen, author of 2X2 and The Vulnerability of Order

Snaketown is a shocking achievement. It's a vision carved in jagged, searing, native prose from the bleak landscape of the American psyche. This story of a crumbling community clinging to a rock, its people flawed and haunted and kin to us all, is an experience so vivid, so terrifying, and so compelling that I fear part of me will be stuck there forever. A work of rare beauty, it's art and storytelling of the highest order. --Steve Lattimore, author of Circumnavigation

In venomous lyricism, Kathleen Wakefield captures the sweltering emptiness at the rim of the high desert in another, woebegone time, where the rustling behind you may be angels' wings or diamondback scales. This scathing novella will remain with you long after you have put it away. A searing triumph. You must read this book! --Rita Williams, author of If The Creek Don't Rise

About this edition

• Publisher: Cleveland State U Poetry Center
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1880834855
• ISBN 13: 9781880834855
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 159