Welcome to Oakland by Eric Miles Williamson

Stories from Angry Nights include “Glass Underfoot” in which tenement tenant Johnny Martins shoots rats as a public service while practicing taking out an enemy and “Blood Relations” where Felice gifts a bottle of Popoff vodka to her homeless brother in exchange for his reading the fortunes of a new boyfriend.Ĭommon Criminals, a dark account of Los Angeles alienation in a controlled style that shed’s harsh electrifying light on the darkness, contains “Deportation at Breakfast,” the most widely anthologized of Fondation’s flash fiction stories and “Trying to Get Aids,” a raw and twisted love story. He’s been called a ruthless poet, a supernatural and mystical animal, as complex as Borges and as accessible and engaging as Elmore Leonard. With compassion but without pity, with tenderness but without sentimentality, always tough but never true, always loving but never blinded by love, always funny but never ironic, Fondation tells the stories of America’s cities.Ĭritics have compared Fondation to Dickens, John Dos Passos, Wanda Coleman, Steinbeck, Henry Roth, Henry Miller, Frank Norris, Denis Johnson, and Eminem as he exhibits a wide range of styles sharing laser sharp focus on the depths and heights of humanity: hate and discrimination, sacrifice, and redemption.

These are compact city fables delivering an anti-moral and a humbling reminder to judge not. Fondation drives with precision the way life can tangle good intentions and trip up even the most sure-footed pedestrians.

Gutter Angels contains work from 1994 to the present, all shining a light on buried life in the darkest corner of the darkest alley in Los Angeles, illuminating the force of life erupting through the rubble of the inner city.

Welcome to Oakland by Eric Miles Williamson