Madison Smartt Bell

Two Southern soldiers, recently back from Vietnam, struggle to resume their lives amid dangerous and deep-rooted prejudice   Thomas Laidlaw returns home from Vietnam with nothing much in mind but to tend his acreage, live apart, and get lost in the roots music he grew up with. Laidlaw's childhood friend Rodney Redmon is doubly burdened: Not only is he scarred from the war, he is also a black man living in a prejudiced area of Tennessee. Redmon's...

Adrian Strother is a hypnotherapist who, paradoxically, can't get to sleep. He's left New York to ply his trade in a depressed section of London, treating phobias and addictions and doing the occasional job for Scotland Yard. That aspect of his work is about to get him involved with the case of a serial killer who targets little girls, as he treads the line between tortured wakefulness and surreal sleep, wrestling with his own demons and fighting...

A film editor takes a job in Italy only to find that half of the gig is cutting film, while the other half is moving uncut dope   Freelance film editor Tracy Bateman has hit a string of bad luck. His country home is crumbling, his marriage is floundering, and his beloved dog just died. But things begin looking up for Tracy when a film producer and old friend, Kevin Carter, offers him a truckload of money to help with a job in Italy. Despite his suspicions...

Madison Smartt Bell's celebrated debut story collection about the daily struggles of life in America   The characters in this captivating collection of stories are linked by imprisonment in desperate circumstances and the currents of history that carry them along. Praised for its clarity of voice and vision, Zero db and Other Stories begins with a grim tour of the Deep South that includes a visit to a Tennessee slaughter yard, an unflinching look...

A photographer descends into New York City's chaotic and brutal underground in this sweeping story of the Big Apple at its seediest   It's 1982, and Clarence Dmitri Larkin is working as a photographer at Bellevue hospital in Manhattan. The job offers a painfully clear perspective on a city sick with madness, fraught with crime, and coming apart at the seams. Larkin's curiosity soon leads to a subterranean world of all the city's secret dangers, including...

Antoine Lavoisier reinvented chemistry, overthrowing the long-established principles of alchemy and inventing an entirely new terminology, one still in use by chemists. Madison Smartt Bell's enthralling narrative reads like a race to the finish line, as the very circumstances that enabled Lavoisier to secure his reputation as the father of modern chemistry-a considerable fortune and social connections with the likes of Benjamin Franklin-also caused...

The author presents a biography of Toussaint Louverture that captures the frequently contradictory and complex life of the leader of the late-eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution, a revolution that became the only successful slave revolt in history.

"When Julie skips school and sets off with her best friend and some local boys for a camping trip in the desert, she finds herself the target of unwanted, drug-fueled sexual attention. Running away in fear, she takes a dangerous fall down the shaft of a vast underground cave, and it takes two days for her to be rescued. Lying unconscious in her hospital bed, Julie hovers between life and death as she travels in a seductive parallel universe inspired...

"The definitive collection of nonfiction-from war reporting to literary criticism to the sharpest political writing-from the 'legend of American letters' (Vanity Fair)"--