Last summer, I told you when Lewis Shiner started giving his short stories away online. Now he’s moving on to his novels, beginning with the recently published Black & White, which Jonathan Lethem describes as “social realism so urgent and committed as to be an act of witnessing.” (And Lethem doesn’t blurb often, so you know there’s something really significant going on in these pages.)
Shiner told Boing Boing his previous novels will follow, as they’re brought back to print by the indie Subterranean Press—which is best known for its science fiction and fantasy catalog, but will be reviving one of the pioneering “slipstream” oeuvres if novels like Glimpses and Deserted Cities of the Heart are included in the mix. And then there’s the early-’90s skatepunk classic Slam… I can’t wait to read that again.
In a recent essay, Shiner discussed one of his starting points in writing Black & White, the communities destroyed by the development of the U.S. interstate highway system, and the long-term consequences: “It’s bad enough to sacrifice a neighborhood for the sake of a greater good,” he writes. “It’s far worse when the destruction—for dubious motives in the first place—is one more step toward the wrong future.”