Tom Robbins has been called "a vital natural resource" by The Portland Oregonian, "one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world" by the FT, and "the most dangerous writer in the world today" by Fernanda Pivano of Italy's Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962. He is the author of six other novels including Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Jitterbug Perfume, Still Life With Woodpecker, Skinny Legs And All and Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas.

An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations....
It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils.

Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat. In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?

Author of Goldilocks in Later Life and of work that's appeared in The New Republic, Exquisite Corpse, Yellow Silk, the Denver Quarterly, and other publications, Richard Ryan divides his time between Wisconsin and the Sonoma coast of California.

'I think my noir is turning grey,' one of the characters in The Golden Rules says. 'It's certainly getting thinner.' That line catches the appeal of this off-beat road novel. Picking up where books like The Postman Always Rings Twice long ago left off, The Golden Rules is a post-modern chronicle of the exploits of Owen Hill, a third-rate actor in a third-rate town. Hill sets off with an assortment of other losers in an elaborate scheme to explore for treasure at the headwaters of the Amazon and change their pedestrian lives into something more glamorous. Hill describes the story this way: 'We're Treasure Island meets On the Road. We're on the trail of the Golden Fleece. We're low comedians after high stakes.' An action-packed, tongue-in-cheek thriller, The Golden Rules is an entertaining story that also manages to take a sardonic glance at our belief in the healing powers of money.

Pynchon wrote in Gravity's Rainbow: "Somewhere, among the wastes of the world, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom," Never has a man's search among those wastes, for that freedom, been better represented than in this stunning conclusion to the Lew Griffin cycle.

In his old house in uptown New Orleans, the one where he and LaVerne lived together, Lew Griffin is alone again, or almost. He and Deborah are drifting apart. His son David has disappeared again, leaving behind a note that sounds final. Alouette, who like her mother has become a social activist (and who has just given birth to a child), is receiving other notes - threatening ones. Heading homeward from his retirement party, Don Walsh has been shot while interrupting a robbery at a convenience store. Worst of all, Lew himself is directionless, no longer teaching, with little to fill his days. He hasn't written anything in years. Off and on he minds the florist shop for Deborah, waits for her to come home from late-night rehearsals, hangs out at parks. He begins to feel a great kinship with those living on the street: the man who barters unwanted things from out of two black garbage bags, another forever reading books fetched from others' curb-side discards, a kindly, psychotic doctor who delivers imaginary children in alleyways and lately a mute, autistic boy and the city's pigeons.

Signed and numbered 500 copy limited edition hardcover

"Richly atmospheric, haunting, utterly compelling, the Lew Griffin novels are magnificent. James Sallis is an outstanding crime writer - an outstanding writer period." - Frances McDormand

James Sallis is best known for his Lew Griffin novels and a recently published, critically acclaimed biography of Chester Himes. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Dan Woodrell comes from a long line of Ozarkers that stretch back before the Civil War. A high school dropout he joined the marine corps at 17.The military and he saw things differently. A period of post military drifting ended up at the University of Kansas and a Michener fellowship at the Iowa Writers School, where he was definitely the odd man out. His first novel, Under the Bright Lights, used the noir form and bought him high praise and recognition from fellow writers. He has also written two other noir novels featuring the Shade family, Muscle For The Wing and The Ones You Do, the civil war novel, Woe To Live On, the country noir Give Us A Kiss and his latest, acclaimed work, Tomato Red. He lives in West Plains, Missouri with his wife, the writer, Katie Estill.