Bøger af Benjamin Wachs

"I was traveling across America, and then Europe, and then Russia, and then the Middle East," author Benjamin Wachs says of these 26 remarkable tales, "waking up each morning not knowing which city I would fall asleep in. Cities became pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, connecting in ways that you could not see on a map, to reveal the secret order of the universe." While these fictional accounts had their visible beginnings in a freelance journalist's world travel, they had their inner beginnings in the fertile workings of a remarkable mind. My own sense of the author, watching him in my writing workshops in San Francisco week after week spin these remarkable, wry, otherworldly tales with the fluid ease of a savant, seemingly unaware of his own genius, is that he is doing something notable and unusual, and it is for that reason that we committed to publishing this book. Among the tales I am most fond of are "Thanatos Cuisine," in which a chef creates dishes too hot to endure yet too delicious to turn down, and "Feeding Time," about the choices a brilliant homeless outcast forces upon those who try to help him. "Childhoods on Display in Boston" evokes our cultural hunger for a neatly commodified past; finally, perhaps my personal favorite, "Some of the Social Issues Surrounding Jazz," blows a sad eulogy for a great American art form that loses its roots in the street the more it is celebrated in the university. Almost all these tales originated in the San Francisco workshop, springing astonishing and fully formed in our living room, with that Benjamin Wachs aura of magical, unconscious coming-into-being, a crystalline fragility fused with intellectual rigor and challenge. "If we tape enough heartfelt wishes on streetlights and leave enough dreams on the curb, anything can happen," Wachs says in his preface. "Millions of souls in crowded neighborhoods praying beneath the surface of their daily lives lead to manifestations of the miraculous and infernal just around the corner. A block of Paris where fire dancers spin outside Notre Dame connects to a sliver of Chicago where angels dance in a speakeasy, that attaches to miraculous Thai food in London, and to a faith healing in San Francisco, to an architectural marvel in Moscow and a tantric revelation in New Orleans, to a lost opera in Vienna and a resurrection in Pittsburgh, and the perfect couch appearing on Craigslist in Toronto. Never stopping. This is the Sacred City." -- Cary Tennis, publisher

In The Deeds of Pounce, the legendary hero, Pitter Patter Pounce, has set out to rid the world of all the ancient evils. Unfortunately, this mouse's actions are upsetting the balance between good and evil which endangers all life on Earth. Desperate, the goblin tribes send agents Gherin and Leptin into the forbidden human lands of San Francisco to stop Pitter Patter Pounce at all costs. Though seemingly alike to outsiders, the two goblins couldn’t be more different. Leptin is a scarred veteran of great battles; Gherin an untested youth from a powerful family who has always wanted to see the forbidden human lands. As they hunt the mouse through San Francisco’s magical underworld, they themselves are hunted by the decadent Duke of Rats, heir to the sewers, and the rabbit Willie O’Shaughnessy, a power broker who offers the goblins all the fruits of human culture if they’ll help his family take over the city.  Time is running out, for as Pounce’s good deeds become more profound, the threat to humans and goblins alike grows stronger. But all this time around humans – with their whiskey and opera and big bridges – is tempting Gherin in ways he never expected.   Now the young goblin must make a choice: to live up to the ideals of his partner and family, or to follow his bliss by cutting a deal with the rabbit and leaving his people forever.