Bøker av Norman Contreras

You're going to Africa to get away from a war in Ukraine you almost went to and from reading Green Hills... you know you can do one better. Welcome to Arusha and the door to the Serengeti. Five safaris to see if you can forget what you are and where you are headed--this is modern travel writing with a little nostalgia for older books and something like the footsteps in Olduvai. We're always tracing older prints from before us, books from books and now this, getting away from the West and hoping against all, love and animals can save you. There's something older here, something forgotten and you can tell by the way she breathed on you that first night, asleep, nose to nose just what's been forgotten. Let's go see what the grass out by the Kopjes can tell us standing in the safari car with just a wish you could start over and just feel something real, just once, please, just once.

Ain't no running with the bulls, ain't no West Egg parties, just a little beach town in Mex with the baddest shorebreak on the planet and some nights and some girls that can't find crazy no matter how hard they try. Add a fuckup with a milkcrate of books and two boogs and a hellbent certainty to be the best and you've got the modern Huck, a real rapscallion wanting nothing more than purple love, and good waves and a good book every once in a while. Perfect sunsets help, but mountains in the rain are better if you're doubleclutching the curves on that 125 you bought at Electra. Come with me, the water's fine.

¿Qué le pasó al mundo? Azul nos dira. Lo encontré así y ¿por qué cambiarlo?, somos así. Parte mineral, parte aire y tempestuosos haremos juntos un recorrido de lo quede del mundo después de la pandemia. Si de un libro se puede volver hacer el mundo, lo tienen en sus manos. Siempre un niño, siempre dolor, y siempre amaneceres y antojos. Bendigan esto y bienvenido al otro lado de las palabras. Fugazes meteoros nos corren arriba y el negro cobalto nos absuelve, tu noche fue y habrá otros pero nada nunca así. Eres único y harás lo que quieras. Te paso la mano por la espalda a que duermas. Ámate.

What can prepare a girl for the greatest test of her life? Maybe a hell of a lot of fishing, maybe surfing the biggest waves in Mexico, but they told her don't go up north alone, maybe it was the easy money fishing on the crabbers up in Alaska, but no it's cold and she's alone and she's going to have to do anything she's told and there may be no hope, that little fluttering inside us all, but if anything there's her father's hands telling her, "you can do this, girl. You can."

Cuba in the eighties and a kid makes a trip with his father to take a Texan's boat up to Key West and all hell breaks loose in Puerto Plata, ice in the Caribbean!, can you imagine that? Now making his way through southern Mexico and a girl he's left on a beach and another in Peron's junta-world he decides to take off for Africa and ends up in the Serengeti and the mind's a flood of everything, of all the people and the things he's seen and he's writing against the day to see if he can save it. Come with him and see if he can change things forever with the first story told the way it should be, as honest as if it had happened to you. No one spent more years in the nineties in southern Mexico riding the biggest waves, long before all the contests came down and you and your boys were the underground. It wasn't until you broke your neck and a buddy broke his but didn't come up that you called it and said, "I've got to find something else", and so you were off to the Serengeti to see if you could follow a book deep into an Africa of the thirties when open Roadsters crossed the grassy plains and the lakes didn't have parks around them and you could walk clear across them.

What started off as a little bumming around in Europe turned into a war for a writer that wanted to see some bullfights and Spanish museums and he had to make a decision. Would he go fight? By turns a travelogue, sometimes just a thought diary, this new book he comes up with just might be his best and he might learn something about the war and himself. Maybe Africa, where he's headed if the bombs start falling on all the European cities he'd love to visit, or if not, some other city on the way to Cuba by way of Cairns for the big fish in October.

En un pequeño pueblo pesquero en la costa norte de RD un hombre se vuelve a encontrar con el hijo que fue cuando viajó con su padre a Cuba. Y en una playa en Oaxaca camina sola una mujer tratando de encontrar su vida de nuevo. ¿Qué los une? En Cabeza de Toro se reúnen todas sus historias.como en cabeza de toro se pesca

A mercenary's son chases his father's ghost to Kyiv and finds a war he doesn't want. He thinks fighting up the Russians will help but thinks better and thinks Africa is the place to be if the big war breaks out. After 4 safaris waiting for it and a goal to be the best writer in the country, he finds a girl at an ice cream shop and says "let's go", and goes back to the Serengeti. Can't tell her age but he finds something truly worth writing about, all the bad money he made to get here, all the Mexico shit he did in his twenties to set himself up and all the friends out in the lemon fields waiting for the planes to land and then the ten good years he fished in the DR on the badass boat he bought with the bad money and he still doesn't know what he's after. But when the money runs out and he has to chase a war he just doesn't have it in him, but he does have a place for his girl and a new start. Waiting for his boy to come he says I'm going to put it all down. One of the best stories ever about war and smuggling and losing it. His only goal the best writing in the country, if he can stay sane and live and make it in Africa alone he just might make it new again, he knows this book will prove it.

Concocted and withdrawn, sullen our currency, the sadness of ages here, now; it melteth glacier and acid its only word, millennial current: arctic, galaxial sweep beyond time: love unbounded, a specter, a star, a mote awash the inked black, forever our song, priam of vesuvius, a well-hung lover adip a river, thigh-high waiting, your siren, your song, my waiting and the apparatus we've built to contain this, political and permanent and dried of belched decree and backroom whisper, your tammany hall, a lincoln minus law, a dixon line drawn of dried crow's feet, a gonad sack tied and wrapped under loincloth on a plain antecedent to lewis and clark.Stones, son and love and song, jeremiad of canticle, a sloven song for the wretched of this stripe, all the wreaths all the gurneys, all the wished kisses on doorsteps to be a good boy; you're here now with this, this world alive and retching and I've hope and I know...I just knowThat all things pass, this bears repeating: all things but us and our love for this; all technology, all scaffolding, all river shall shift, the bend of us, a pi of breadth related our longevity, see: we gnaw at this nut, our gums raw with it, the pleasure of our work, our industry and our philosophy and our reprieve; the selfsame cacophony of sorts, gnashing of gears and love's antidote, a sunken cenote somewhere in us; melville's wharf, your manhatoe, soup's kitchen or bowery, or an Olath gun behind a Casper stripmall, your field; your song.