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Dreamland
Sam explains: "The story of this epidemic
involves shoelaces, rebar, Levi’s 501s, cellphones, football, Walmart, American
prosperity, with marketing, with Mexican poverty and social competition, and
with the biggest swimming pool in the US and what happened when that was
destroyed.
"It’s about the marketing of prescription
pills as a solution to pain of all kinds, and about a small town in Mexico
where young men have devised a system for retailing heroin across America like
it was pizza.
"The tale took me from Appalachia to suburbs
in Southern California, into one of the biggest drug-abuse stories of our time
– and one of the quietest, and whitest as well.
It’s been a long haul, and I thank the many
people I met and spoke to along the way as I put together this American saga.
Hope you like it. – Sam
From the publisher: Over the past fifteen years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in the
small county of Xalisco on the west coast of Mexico have created a unique
distribution system that has brought black tar heroin--the cheapest, most
addictive form of the opiate, two to three times purer than its white powder
cousin--to the veins of people across the United States. Communities where
heroin had never been seen before have become overrun with it.
Local police and
residents are stunned: How could heroin, long considered a drug found only in
the dense, urban environments along the East Coast, and trafficked into the
United States by enormous Colombian drug cartels, be so incredibly ubiquitous
in the American heartland? Who was bringing it here and why were so many
townspeople suddenly eager for the comparatively cheap high it offered?
Acclaimed journalist
Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of American capitalism in Doped
Up: Young men in Mexico, independent of the drug cartels, in search of
their own American Dream via the fast and enormous profits of trafficking cheap
black tar heroin to America's rural and suburban addicts; and Purdue Pharma,
determined to corner the market on pain with its new and expensive miracle
drug, Oxycontin, extremely addictive in its own right. Quinones illuminates
just how these two stories fit together as cause and effect. Doped Up is
a dramatic and revelatory account of addiction spreading to every part of the
American landscape.
Reviews
“The most original
writer on Mexico and the border out there.” – San Francisco
Chronicle Book Review
“Journalist Quinones
weaves an extraordinary story, including the personal journeys of the addicted,
the drug traffickers, law enforcement, and scores of families affected by the
scourge, as he details the social, economic, and political forces that
eventually destroyed communities in the American heartland and continues to
have a resounding impact.” – starred review, Booklist
“In Dreamland,
former Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Quinones deftly recounts how a
flood of prescription pain meds, along with black tar heroin from Nayarit,
Mexico, transformed the once-vital blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, and
other American communities into heartlands of addiction. With prose direct yet
empathic, he interweaves the stories of Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics agents,
and small-town folks whose lives were upended by the deluge of drugs, leaving
them shaking their heads, wondering how they could possibly have
resisted.” – Mother Jones
“Dreamland
spreads out like a transnational episode of The Wire, alternately maddening,
thrilling, depressing, and with writing as sharp and insightful as a razor
blade. You cannot understand our drug war and Mexican immigration to the United
States without reading this book.” – Gustavo Arellano, syndicated
columnist, ¡Ask a Mexican!,
“Unflinching . . .
compellingly investigated.” – Kirkus
“Fascinating . . . a
harrowing, eye-opening look at two sides of the same coin, the legal and
illegal faces of addictive painkillers and their insidious power.” –
Publishers Weekly
Innsmouth Free Press 30% off
Buy direct and
get 30% off selected print titles until July 5. Choose from these anthologies or collections. On their website, click on the title you are interested in, click on “add to
cart” button located below the book summary. Discount applied at checkout. Here
are just two of the selections:
Love & Other
Poisons by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Poison
is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a
poison or a remedy. This collection of 18 speculative stories, including three
never found in print before, explores the meaning of love, and, of course, of
poison.
Sword & Mythos
– The blades of heroes clash against the
darkest sorcery. Aztec warriors ready for battle, intent on conquering a
neighboring tribe, but different gods protect the Matlazinca. For Arthur
Pendragon, the dream of Camelot has ended. What remains is a nightmarish battle
against his own son, who is not quite human. Master Yue, the great swordsman, sets
off to discover what happened to a hamlet that was mysteriously abandoned. He
finds evil.Sunsorrow, the ancient dreaming sword, pried from the heart of the
glass god, yearns for Carcosa. Fifteen writers, drawing inspiration from the
pulp sub-genres of sword and sorcery and the Cthulhu Mythos, seed stories of
adventure, of darkness, of magic and monstrosities. From Africa to realms of
neverwhere, here is heroic fantasy with a twist.
Hungry Darkness
Severed Press just released Gabino Iglesias's Hungry Darkness: Deep Sea
Thriller.
From the publisher: Nick Ayres
wanted to be the first man to explore all of Caye Caulkers’ Giant Cave, the
largest underwater cave in the world. Instead of fame and fortune, he found
death at the hands of something that defies science, accidentally unleashing it
on the island’s unsuspecting population.
Gabriel Robles is the man hired
to take care of the monster. He knows the water and its inhabitants better than
anyone else, but he's never faced something so deadly. Robles has to figure
something out quick, because the victims are piling up and it’s only a matter
of time before the blood in the water becomes a problem for all of Belize,
maybe even the world.
Ancient Hunger,
Silent Wings
 |
| tejano author David Bowles |
Devilfish Review just
published David Bowles's fantasy story featuring 18th-century Mexican vampires.
Here's the opening:
Nicolasa Sandoval
Murillo had not quite reached her thirteenth saint’s day when the hunger came
upon her, sudden and sharp like talons round her gut, in the middle of the
night. She crept wincing but quiet to the kitchen, where her grandmother’s clay
olla of beans cooled slowly upon dying embers in the wood stove.
Snatching up a cold tortilla someone had left on the roughhewn table, Nicolasa
uncovered the jar and began shoveling the spicy mixture into her mouth. Soon
she found herself gagging—the beans, normally delicious, tasted of ash and
bile. With a frantic lurch she stumbled out of doors and vomited an acidic
stream onto the mucky street.
The door opened behind
her, and a figure emerged with a petroleum lantern: it was her grandmother
Florencia Murillo—Mamá Lencha—and in place of anger or concern, a look of
resigned understanding smoothed the woman’s wrinkled brow.
“It is the hunger, yes?
It awakened you.”
Nicolasa nodded, her empty
stomach too queasy for speech.
The origin of Daniel José Older's story
If you're on Twitter, you know what "storifies"
means. Read two
origin storifies about his great novel, Shadowshaper.
Es todo hoy, since I'm behind on my reading,
RudyG, a.k.a. Chicano author Rudy Ch. Garcia, this week, completing
what he imagines is his first great kids' story. We'll all know, if it lands up here.
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