Author Keith Maillard received critical acclaim with his novel Gloria, which told the story of a young woman on the cusp of womanhood in a town called Raysburg, West Virginia. In this book, The Clarinet Polka, Maillard turns that same eagle-eyed attention to the other side of the tracks of that very same town and creates a stunning portrait of Polish America and of one man's struggle to find meaning in his life and roots.The year is 1969, and young Jimmy Koprowski ...

This story begins with a phone call out of the blue: a lawyer tells a writer that his ninety-six-year-old father, with whom he has had no contact since the age of three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has just died, leaving him nothing. Half-reluctant, half-fascinated, both angry and curious, Keith Maillard begins to research his father’s life. The result is a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction—a social history often reading like a detective story—as well as...

An engrossing, timely, and contemporary novel about the bonds between twins, about sexuality and gender fluidity, and about the messy complexities of modern family life – the much-anticipated new novel, the first in more than a decade, from acclaimed writer Keith Maillard. Dr. Erica Bauer – an identical twin – studies twins at the university in Vancouver. Through the course of her research, she meets a set of preteen twins who are evidently fraternal, but who insist emphatically that they ...

One writer's deeply compelling story of growing up nonbinary in the 1940s and '50sAs a child, Keith Maillard asked his mother and grandmother, over and over again, "Am I a boy, or am I a girl?" Neither "boy" nor "girl" quite fit. But there were no other options.In this stunning memoir, Maillard creates an intricate collage of childhood memories, exploring the contradictory and destructive forces at work that put his very life at risk. For young Keith, writi...

Hot Springs, Arkansasby Keith MaillardWorld War II-era Hot Springs is the foundation for this author’s story, a tale about his family’s crumbling dynamics in troublesome times.“‘Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,’ my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunda...

In this, the first volume of Difficulty at the Beginning, John Dupre is a student at Raysburg Military Academy, where his best friend Lyle Ledzinski is training him to be a perfect Socratic athlete: A sound mind in a sound body.Together they want to experience all of life — athletics, philosophy, beer, the quest for Truth, and most of all, those mysterious creatures that seem to come from another planet: girls. By their junior year they've taken to hitch-hiking around, fired up ...

The Summer of Love is already like a distant memory; the psychedelic underground has turned in on itself. John Dupre has deserted a perfectly satisfying life as a student in Toronto, drawn back to the US by the need to make a difference in the Revolution. He's living in Boston—under an assumed name because he's on the FBI's wanted list for draft evasion.His best friend is Tom Parker, an ex—GI turned righteous drug dealer. When John, Tom, and the militant feminist and Situationist P...

John Dupre, a junior at West Virginia University, is an English major on the Dean's List dressed up as a Beatnik cowboy, the folk-singing resident outsider before nonconformity became a youth uniform.Morgantown is a masterful ensemble piece centering around John and peopled by his unforgettable friends in the out crowd: Bill Cohen, the sharpshooting, knife-throwing Zen Buddhist Harvard scholar; Marge Levine, the political radical with the Nefertiti eyes; and William Reving...

Boyish Leslie, a retired competitive swimmer turned children’s librarian, and girlish Alan, a fashionable hairstylist, are living parallel lives of thwarted desire, but soon they will be utterly transformed as the middle-aged shaman, Mildred McKenzie, opens the crack between the worlds and hurls them into an alternate reality. Originally published in 1976, Two Strand River is one of the earliest literary novels to star transgendered characters. Reprinted twice, it has long been c...

Evan Carlyle, a bright young man on the make who emigrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, returns to his hometown and runs into the last person he wants to see, his old buddy, the legendary hell-raiser, Alex Warner. Evan’s life has been a series of successes; he has a flashy girlfriend and makes good money as a producer for CBC Radio. Alex has not been so lucky; he’s trapped in a dead-end marriage and owns a failing service station hit hard by the 1970s energy crisis. Fueled b...

It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of JFK has left John Dupre—and all of America— with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that Southern asshole with a public persona cut from an old rock and roll song: I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW.It's oppressively hot, the kind of heat that makes it practically impossible to do anything, or even think straight—and if John's brains aren't addled enough by the temperature, there’s the endless obsession with girls—the persistent problems of his ...

The darkest of Keith Maillard’s novels, Motet is “sung” in three radically different voices. Paul, a professor of musicology, is researching a sixteenth century motet and finding a nightmarish story of heresy, persecution, torture and death. Steve, a rock drummer, longs for the transformative “sainthood” of Hendrix, Joplin, or Jim Morrison, but remains haunted by a drug-related murder in Boston’s 60s underground. Kathy, a failed jazz musician and Steve’s deserted wife, i...