Letters from Dwight: Down and Out in Riverside

by Gary Kern

A memoir of slum life in Southern California. The author, an ex-professor of Russian literature, rents rooms on Dwight Avenue in Riverside to a series of oddballs, meanwhile trying to maintain contact with his broken family and to keep up with events in the collapsing Soviet Union. His letters, transcribed from cassette recordings sent to friends, describe ordinary and yet fantastic living with a religious fanatic, reading to friends with a barn owl on his shoulder, going to a Halloween party dressed as a gorilla, waking up in a field with a nail in his head, chasing his husky in a herd of sheep while a Basque shepherd waves a gun behind him, trying to get a job back East and getting lost on the Washington Beltway, discovering the filthiest toilets in Moscow, getting kicked in the heart in karate class, riding in an ambulance with bullets whistling around him... It's a wild ride with an author who speaks with urgency, irony and wit. The fifteen letters, created in the 1980s, will particularly interest any readers who have been downsized, outsourced or simply thrown out.

MISFORTUNE, LETTERS FROM DWIGHT and UNDER BLUE MOUNTAIN combine to form a 30-year trilogy (1976-2006) entitled EXILE IN CALIFORNIA, but each is an independent work.

386 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 24, 2011