Smoking Seventeen

It's 1992. Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. He's looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher – attractive, mid-thirties – takes an interest in him. It seems like a fantasy come true.

Prison is where Zeke Caligiuri is. Powderhorn Park in South Minneapolis, dubbed “Murderapolis” the year he turned eighteen, is where he comes from. It was the same neighborhood his father grew up in but had changed dramatically by the early 1990s. Yet in Zeke’s family, father and mother and grandmother kept things together while all around them the houses decayed and once-safe streets gave way to the crush of poverty and crime.

It's a steamy June afternoon in Louisiana, circa 1956, and Sissy LeBlanc is sitting on her front porch, wondering – half seriously – if she could kill herself with aspirins and Coca-Cola

The unmistakable accent of the Piney Woods of East Texas rolls from the pages of Fender Lizards, Joe R. Lansdale’s tale of the life and love and work of one Dot Sherman, who delivers on her promise that her story is “the real thing from beginning to end.”