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Yellowfish
A Novel
John Keeble
New Foreword by William Kittredge
New Afterword by the Author
Wesley Erks, itinerant machinist and adventurer, takes a hefty fee for smuggling a group of illegal Chinese immigrants ("yellowfish") from Vancouver, B.C., to San Francisco in the 1970s. Three are teenaged "Hong Kong boys," one of whom is dying from an earlier stab wound; the fourth is the son of a rich Chinese casino owner who wants to settle some debts with The Triad, a secret Chinese society. The story of the perilous and suspenseful journey of these five men, filled with colorful fictional and historical characters, is as memorable as the story of the West itself.
John Keeble, professor emeritus of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, is the author of two novels, including Broken Ground, Nocturnal America, a collection of short stories, and Out of the Channel, a book of nonfiction. His fiction and nonfiction are widely published in literary magazines, and he has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Washington State Governor's Writers Award.
For more information on the author go to: http://www.johnkeeble.net/books.htm
Quotes:
"A novel of grandeur and daring, a book of fierce pleasures. Its themes are those that have occupied the great story-tellers from the beginning: the journey of self-discovery, danger and self reliance."-Raymond Carver
"A complex, almost Faulknerian portrait of the Pacific Northwest - as beautiful and mysterious as the area itself. It is also a hell of a good read."-James Welch
"Its surface is a stunning story of survival; its depth is the American journey to the West. They reflect each other, for Yellowfish is a new version of how the West was and is won by lost people. A bright vision of the morals of necessity, beautifully told." - Mary Lee Settle
"The author restores the tired abstractions of great Western space and silence with fresh feelings of motion and flight. Both animals and men are hunted in this hard though never heartless book. The prey die with fierce dignity and the predators do not gloat." - Time
"One golden book. A Western worthy of the name . . . yet mystical, timeless, universal." - Chicago Sun Times
"John Keeble has written a thrilling book. . . . He has a fine ear for dialogue; all of his people live and breathe on the page; the men are wonderfully drawn, and the women!-the women are superb. . . . I want you to read this book, cherish it, lend it to your friends." - Carolyn Kizer, Northwest Review
"Along comes John Keeble, loaded with panache and talent. . . . Keeble has done nothing less than fashion a new way of looking at a region of the earth, a country and its people." - Toronto Globe and Mail
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Pub Date:
September 2008
ISBN:
PAPER:
0-295-98845-2
978-0-295-98845-0
Price:
Paper: $18.95
Subject Listing:
Fiction, Asian American Studies, Western History
Bibliographic information:
Orig. pub. 1981. 336 pp., 5.5 x 8 in.
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