How To Paint A Dead Man

Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon. Covering half a century, this is a luminous and searching novel, and Hall's most accomplished work to date.

'The Lake District's answer to The Handmaid's Tale.' Guardian England is in a state of environmental and economic crisis. Under the repressive regime of The Authority, citizens have been herded into urban centres, and all women of child-bearing age fitted with contraceptive devices. A woman known as 'Sister' leaves her oppressive marriage to join an isolated group of women in a remote northern farm at Carhullan, where she intends to become a rebel fighter. But can she follow their notion of freedom and what it means to fight for it? 'At the vanguard of the new wave of futuristic dystopian literature . . . an accomplished, provocative novel.' Literary Review 'Hall's fierce and shocking writing captures the cruel beauty of Cumbria.' Telegraph 'A dystopian vision of a disturbingly near future in which the floods have risen and the oil has run out . . . entirely modern and brutally fresh.' Independent

A lyric leap forward from Harry Bauld's playful and passionate debut, The Uncorrected Eye, How to Paint a Dead Man peers so intensely at art that the verse becomes somehow both hallucinatory and colloquial at the same time. The new collection leaves aside the formal dance of some of the earlier work but extends the vivid and often comic explorations of art and the American vernacular. With no-look pathos and sudden jazzy riffs, many of these poems vamp on artists from Renaissance how-to author Cennino Cennini through Canaletto, Rembrandt, Magritte, the German Expressionists, and Picasso, often through dramatic monologues; Bauld also pitches playfully through fellow writers Mark Strand and Joyce Carol Oates, among others, to tap into the turbulent spirit of the moment. "Always now / it seems we look at art and it looks back / at us on trial," as he writes in "The Eyes." One figure that looms large here belongs to 80's avatar Jean-Michel Basquiat, the former street graffiti artist who shot to world-wide fame and died of a drug overdose at twenty seven. Bauld, who spends part of the year in the Basque country and has written previously about that region's complex history, is oddly sensitive to the seemingly merely linguistic tie between Basque and Basquiat. It's the voice of a Basquiat angel in "Annunciation" who says, "You already/gave birth to this flame/you don't know the name of." The painted "dead man" of the title takes on many identities: not only the poet's father but Basquiat, Mark Strand, the victims of a mass shooting--and the shooter himself--as well as each of the artists evoked, having passed ironically under Bauld's gaze from observer to observed, painter to model, creator to subject. "Art is always saying hello and poetry is always saying goodbye," reads the Kenneth Koch inscription to the book's opening poem, the punning and satirical list, "Duals in the Old West." ("The sun is always saying shut up and the moon is always whispering tell me more....") But Bauld sets out not just to burlesque and blur but to erase these teasing but finally facile dualities. This a collection that displays, explores, and ultimately fuses all sorts of opposition: fame and obscurity, serenity and violence, inner and outer experience, what's real and what's imagined. One expects no less from a poet whose own name is an oxymoron. Still, floating above the undercurrent of death-haunted discontent and loss is also a delight-the hello of art, in Bauld's case verbal as well as visual, in the face of elegy's traditional goodbye: "It's what you do after you go down/that counts," he writes in "Self Portrait as Marco Polo as Miles Davis" about the floored boxer Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. And in "Cadillac Moon," with a sidelong swipe at our current political scene, the poet observes a Basquiat rendering of a car: a set of fantasy wheels that play like four-square in the hands of children who, like the seven artists who will save us, plow their fingers in paint furrows to change all the colors of today's sky, rub out the authoritarian moon and everything under it, making a holy mess and moving on. Tense with the heightened contemporary sounds Bauld discovers in the paintings of the past, How To Paint a Dead Man makes its own holy mess and moves on.

The third novel starring Montana's fly fisherman-cum-detective Sean Stranahan, for fans of C. J. Box and Craig Johnson Wolves howl as a riderless horse returns at sunset to the Culpepper Dude Ranch in the Madison Valley. The missing woman, Nanika Martinelli, is better known as the Fly Fishing Venus, a red-haired river guide who lures clients the way dry flies draw trout. As Sheriff Martha Ettinger follows hoof tracks in the snow, she finds one of the men who has fallen under the temptress’s spell impaled on the antler tine of a giant bull elk, a kill that’s been claimed by a wolf pack. An accident? If not, is the killer human or animal? With painter, fly fisherman, and sometimes private detective Sean Stranahan’s help, Ettinger will follow clues that point to an animal rights group called the Clan of the Three-Clawed Wolf and to their svengali master, whose eyes blaze with pagan fire. In their most dangerous adventure yet, Stranahan and Ettinger find themselves in the crossfire of wolf lovers, wolf haters, and a sister bent on revenge, and on the trail of an alpha male gone terribly wrong.

"And my soul shall lie for ever under the curse, engulfed and hidden as deeply as the Great Ruby beneath the shadow of Dead Man's Rock."--Goodreads

Rilee Dust isn’t your typical wood carver, she’s young and making a go of it in the small village of Tickle Creek, Oregon. She’s also the only one in town who isn’t determined to get rid her strip club neighbor. Everyone else, however, is ready to evict the Girls, Girls, Girls. When a dog adopts her and turns her life upside down, Rilee’s not so sure it’s a good thing. Especially when he leads her to a moose, a military man and a dead body. Because the moose kicked her butt, the man saved her life and the dead body is one of her customers. Now Rilee’s smack dab in the middle of all the small town politics with a killer on the loose who has an ax to grind. And Rilee just may be the next victim to have her name carved in stone. All authors proceeds donated to a wounded veteran's organization.

On the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, Cy Parks spends his childhood years first in a guest house for consumptives run by his mother and then as apprentice to alcoholic tattoo-artist Eliot Riley. Thirsty for new experiences, he departs for America and finds himself in the riotous world of the Coney Island boardwalk, where he sets up his own business as 'The Electric Michelangelo'. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak-shows, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious immigrant and circus performer who commissions him to cover her entire body in tattooed eyes. Hugely atmospheric, exotic and familiar, The Electric Michelangelo is a love story and an exquisitely rendered portrait of seaside resorts on opposite sides of the Atlantic by one of the most uniquely talented novelists of her generation.

Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father—the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father's work to find the truth of who he really was.