Geoff Nicholson

"A cartography-obsessed misfit clerk from an antique map store in a district that's not quite trendy yet. A bold young woman chasing the answer to a question she can't quite formulate. A petty criminal hoping the parking lot he's just purchased is the ticket to a new life of respectability with his school-age daughter. A ruthless but vulnerable killer and his disgruntled accomplice. In The City Under the Skin, it's not fate that will bind these characters together but something more concrete and sinister: the appearance of a group of mysterious women, their backs crudely and extensively tattooed with maps. They have been kidnapped, marked, and released, otherwise unharmed. When one turns up on the doorstep of the map shop and abruptly bares her back, only to be hustled away by a man in a beat-up blue Cadillac, it's the misfit clerk Zak, pushed by his curious new friend Marilyn, who finds himself reluctantly entering a criminal underworld whose existence he'd prefer to ignore. In this haunting literary thriller, Geoff Nicholson paints a deft portrait of a city in transition. His sharply drawn characters are people desperate to know where they are but scared of being truly seen. A meditation on obsession and revenge, a hymn to the joys of urban exploration, The City Under the Skin is a wholly original crime novel about the indelible scars we both live with and inflict on others."--Jacket.

A Collection of twenty-four short stories for romance and reality.

A fascinating, definitive, and very personal rumination on the history, science, philosophy, art, and literature of walking, by a skilled cultural commentator. Geoff Nicholson, author of Bleeding London and Sex Collectors, turns his eye to the intellectual and cultural history of that most common of activities — walking. This simple, omnipresent activity has inspired numerous subcultures, literary and artistic legacies, sporting events, personal memories, epic journeys, mystical revelations, and scandals. It’s a rich tradition that embraces such novelists as Charles Dickens and Paul Auster, musicians like Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan, and moviemakers from Buster Keaton to Werner Herzog. But it’s also a tradition that includes obsessives and eccentrics, such as the artist Mudman, who coats his body in mud and then walks the city streets; competitive pedestrians such as Captain Barclay, who walked one mile an hour for a thousand successive hours; and gang members who use the hidden language of the “Crip Walk” to spell out messages in the dirt with their scuffing. How we walk, where we walk, why we walk announces who and what we are. Geoff Nicholson is a master chronicler of the hidden subversive twists on a seemingly normal activity. He analyzes the hows, wheres, and whys of walking through the ages. He finds people who walk only at night, or naked, or for thousands of miles at a time, in costume, for causes, or for no reason whatsoever. Here, he brings curiosity and genuine insight to a subject that often walks right past us.

A spoof on the British capital with three protagonists. One is a man organizing walking tours, another has arrived from the provinces to punish the rapists of his girlfriend and a third is a half-Japanese woman who collects lovers.

anthology of erotic passages in classic literature

How do women treat one another in the absence of men to treat them badly? Martha finds out when, reeling from the shock of yet another failed romance and sick of her own starchy literal-mindedness, she seeks solace among a group of somewhat addled devotees of the ancient matriarchal Goddess. Befriended by Isis Moonwagon, an academic turned New Age priestess, Martha follows the Goddess worshippers from the upscale beaches of Fire Island to the inhospitable Arizona desert, where a Native American medicine woman bullies them through the punitive rituals of the sweat lodge and vision quest. As petty tensions and major crises escalate out of control, the women's dream of returning to the simple ways of primitive hunters and gatherers shatters under the pressure of a more predatory reality. . With the acerbic wit and compassion that have marked her widely acclaimed previous works, Francine Prose here offers a sharp-eyed consideration of how men and women differ in their pursuit - and avoidance - of power, sex, and competition. A satire of the pieties of New Age religion and knee-jerk feminism, Hunters and Gatherers nevertheless radiates sympathy for our efforts to reconcile spiritual longings with our earthbound, all-too-human nature.

When the debut novel of Gregory Collins is accepted by a publisher he seems set on a course for literary stardom. There's just one problem: he doesn't quite have the looks to match his talent, and his publisher wants a photo to put on the book jacket. He asks his handsome (but dim) college classmate, Mike Smith, to take his place. Consequently it is Smith rather than Collins who receives the offer to be writer-in-residence at an asylum where therapy is centered on the soothing powers of literature. It's not long before the boundaries between inmate and observer are blurred in this literary cuckoo's nest and this comedy of errors verges on tragedy.