Lanny will be awarding a $25 Amazon/Barnes&Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Please use the following link to share your comments:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f3241/
Blurb
Donny
Lentini is a talented young man hungry for his mother's love. To please her, he
becomes guardian angel to his mob-wannabe father. When the father is murdered
and found with his hands hacked off, Donny is dealt a set of cards in a game
called vengeance. The pot is stacked high with chips; the ante, his soul and
the lives of loved-ones. With the help of friends—ex-con, defrocked Jesuit Bill
Conlon along with former high-school nemesis, Antwyne Claxton—he digs for
whether the murder had anything to do with the mob's lust for a real estate
parcel owned by the family of Donny's lover. He's new at this game. He doesn't
cheat, but plays his cards well. And he gets what he wants.
Excerpt
My foot slid over to touch Dad’s.
“Is this about the money you lost at
the table?” I said. “Should we play a few more hands?” I kept my eyes fixed on
his.
Dad reached over and put his hand on
mine.
“I didn’t lose the office cleaners,”
he said. A bead of sweat meandered toward his jaw. “The union was working on
’em going back three years now. It was a done deal by the time I got there.
Don’t I otherwise do good?”
“Whatever,” German said. “Just don’t
let it happen again. And tell Donny here to mind his manners or you’ll be back
driving a truck.”
The baseball bat leaning in a corner
was an exclamation point punctuating German’s directive. If it came down to
that I’d slash his throat with a rusty knife. Yet I had to walk a tightrope.
Dad would have preferred the bat to the demotion. He was a climber and German
his future.
German picked up a couple of coded
folders and put them into a filing cabinet, slamming the drawer down its rails
like a runaway train.
“Oh, and Joojy wants to see you. I
don’t know about what.”
“What about?” Dad said.
“You don’t hear? I said I don’t know!
Maybe that thing. Now get outta here, both yiz. I got to take my daughter to
ballet.”
I asked Lanny about his views on writing. This is what he answers:
I have never known artists who could
constrain themselves from doing art.
My particular art form is language and
story, and no more could Picasso forebear from scrawling shapes on napkins
could I avoid having a pen nearby or hovering over my keyboard focused like a
gamma ray for just the right adjective, image, scene, or conflict.
One legacy of my Italian heritage is to be
naturally expressive, usually as dramatically as possible. It’s why we need our
hands and body language to give mere words a supercharge. After all, we
invented opera. So this proclivity long predates any inclination to write
fiction.
Yet, most of my adult life was as a businessman—various
iterations of it. Throughout that time, chasing the buck may have occupied my
attention but did not subsume my tendency to express myself. So I wrote
letters. Not newsy letters, but inner landscape letters—my thoughts and
feelings about people and events, my desire being to resonate with the person
to whom I wrote. My discussions with friends and colleagues were the same; it
took a long time to notice their eyes glaze over, most wanting a simple answer
in a world which to them was simple. But not to me.
Then, after I became financially
independent with no inclination for golf and not dealing well with leisure
time, I was relaxing and an image popped into my head. To this day, I have no
idea as to its provenance, but it was so vivid I was compelled to write it out.
It was of two high school boys, one a bully, having it out behind the gym.
After I wrote it, I asked, what brought them there? So I wrote that out.
It just kept going and I kept writing, writing. It emerged as such a pleasure
and challenge that eight years later it was as if I had been John D.
Rockefeller and found my first oil well.
Throughout my getting-to-be-long life, I
have been a man of serial obsessions, all of them gratifying and fulfilling,
but in becoming a writer—even before I was published or won contests—none can
match the creative life, the artistic life. I literally go to sleep nights
saying thank-you prayers to have stumbled upon something that consumes me so
passionately and spiritually and emotionally rewarding.
Author bio and links
Lanny
Larcinese ‘s short work has appeared in magazines and has won a handful of
local prizes. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He’s a native
mid-westerner transplanted to the City of Brotherly Love where he has been
writing fiction for seven years. When not writing, he lets his daughter,
Amanda, charm him out of his socks, and works at impressing Jackie, his
long-time companion who keeps him honest and laughing—in addition to being his
first-line writing critic. He also spends more time than he should on Facebook
but feels suitably guilty for it.
Links:
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteAdd my thanks too!
DeleteThank you for sharing your review of this book, it sounds like a very great read and I'm glad I got to hear about it.
ReplyDeleteHow do you come up with the characters names in your book?
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to check this one out!
ReplyDeleteGreat excerpt! Sounds like a must read.
ReplyDelete