Anthony & Lorraine - Evolution

by Michael Atkinson

Anthony, on his way from basketball practice with his team mates, is left alone as usual. Not that he minds, he loves his esoteric world. Not tonight, though. He hears sounds emanating from one of Brooklyn's sordid alley's, and with nothing better to do, he foolishly goes in to investigate. Now Anthony fi nds himself a witness to . . . He later finds out that the victim is an important man, from Washington. The icing on the cake, is that the man he saw committing the violent crime in the alley, is now looking for him, and wants him to be his next victim/trophy. Everyone is in the loop, but not Lorraine. What scares her the most, is that Anthony, her friend from childhood, is acting weird, and looking even worse. An ex-convict, and the nephew of the President of the US of A, Ed is now relishing his new life as a member of the NYPD. His hedonistic mission in life has now changed course, and Ed reluctantly has to use the little police prowess he has to fi nd the witness to his crime. This story is about Brooklyn New York, where two innocent budding high school basketball stars, have to endure the vile and grime that

568 pages, Hardcover

First published June 23, 2011

About the author

A son of Long Island and a father of three, I love very good beer, shellfish of any sort, Italian opera in the summertime, and movies. I own more books than I do any other one thing. I love writing, though, making sentences. In addition to my books, I've written, and still write, film criticism, cultural attack, book reviews and essays for The Village Voice, The Believer, Sight & Sound, The Guardian (U.K.), In These Times, The Boston Phoenix, SPiN, Film Comment, Modern Painters, Moving Image Source, IFC.com, The Forward, Maxim, The Progressive, The American Prospect, The Poetry Foundation, The Criterion Collection, Turner Classic Movies (tcm.com), The L Magazine, LA Weekly, and elsewhere.

I have also written a certain amount of unproduced TV, and one pilot that was in fact shot and then vanquished, despite extraordinary notoriety,
BABYLON FIELDS, which can be easily Googled.

My first novel, set in 1956 Key West and ending up in the Cuban mountains with Che and Fidel, HEMINGWAY DEADLIGHTS is the first of a projected series, gallivanting around in the most famous literary biography of the 20th century with a nod to history but also a robust jones for truth, irony, cocktails and culprits.

The second volume, HEMINGWAY CUTTHROAT, finds Hemingway investigating the very real murder of Jose Robles in 1937 Spain.

For #3... methinks Paris.

Not incidentally, at least not to me, I'm also a widely published poet, the winner of Word Works' Washington Prize in 2001, a runner-up for the National Poetry Series in 2001 and 1998, a selectee for The Best American Poetry 1993 (eds. Louise Gluck & David Lehman, Collier/Macmillan, 1993), a recipient of a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, 1988-89, etc. My poems have been in Epoch, Crazyhorse, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Ontario Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry East, The Seneca Review, Cimarron Review, Chelsea, Chicago Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Seattle Review, Graham House Review, New Orleans Review, Kansas Quarterly, Mudfish, Willow Springs, Massachusetts Review, and many other journals.

Lastly, I find pride in the fact that my children can find Timbuktu on a map, I vote anti-imperialist whenever it is possible to do so, and I believe deeply in the existence of human stupidity.