So, I'd been thinking about reading a Peter Plate book for a while now, since (a) he's a San Francisco-based author and (b) he spoke at the anarchist bookfair one year. Ok, so I did find him obnoxious at the book fair but I figured I'd give his books a chance, since I do like reading books by SF ...
The narrator of Police and Thieves, Doojie, is a small-time dealer who lives in a garage behind a laundromat with his two partners in crime. They sell dope of questionable quality at reasonable prices. But when one night Doojie sees a renegade cop shoot an unarmed Mexican, he knows that things ar...
Waltzing into the kitchen in her bathrobe, Harriet nabbed the horn, praying it was one of her girlfriends. She needed to talk to someone. Robert had been acting so peculiar. He was getting on her nerves and that made her skin break out. Her hopes evaporated when the automated voice came on. Then ...
In doing so, I came across Eldon Paskins scrubbing the corridor floor. He was humming to himself, swirling the head of a mop over the linoleum in arabesques. A bucket of bleach-laced water was by his side. His face was solemn, a portrait of transcendence via manual labor. The custodian was as tra...
Mission Street was stinking like a slaughterhouse; flyblown meat spiced the air. The heat was riding up the thermometer faster than anyone could remember. The church bells of Mission Dolores were tolling long, monotonous peals that reverberated throughout the neighborhood. Salvadorean women dress...
Vocational training was necessary—in San Francisco, you can’t start too early. The hoopla began three months after his birth. His mother was a vivacious, sometimes malicious brunette who went by the moniker of Doby. She was a young woman entering post-adolescence, not pleased with being a mother ...
He was listening to the raindrops pinging against his living room’s windows. His discomfort started when he and Mitzi went to lunch at a North Beach bistro. An old Italian place on Stockton Street. The waiter told them dairy items were off the menu, due to Fukushima-related contamination. Some ve...
It heard a mighty flapping of wings, looked to see what kind of bird was making the noise, and was attacked by a red-tailed hawk. The predator sank its talons in the dove’s neck and yanked it from the pole. Flying off with the stunned creature, the hawk zoomed over the New College law school camp...