From the award-winning author of The Last Rose Of Summer and This Side Of Jordan comes a new prose novel framed within a city where gangsters murder ordinary citizens and everyone seems to have a get-rich scheme. Set as the Roaring '20s come to a thunderous close, The Big Town evokes a lost era through language and flamboyant characters reminiscent of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Ring Lardner, and yet it also eerily mirrors our own time with its study of the role of business, crime, morality, and love in our lives.

Monte Schulz, son of celebrated Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, examines the surprising truths of three strong-willed women in the summer of 1929. Schulz delicately charts the tender rhythms of a small East Texas town as its inhabitants grapple with identity as related to gender, race and family. With respect, this generous novel tunes our emotions to the collective and poetic web of experience, shattering the varnish of everyday fiction into a constellation of real life.

Told in a darkly comic, noir style and based on a true story, Monte Schulz's new prose novel, Naughty, tells the tale of a beautiful murderess and her smitten patsy of a husband on the loose in 1950's California. Schulz combines the exquisitely wrought language of his recent Jazz-Age trilogy with a straight-for-thethroat pulpy narrative- fans of Don DeLillo and Jim Thompson will not be disappointed.

BE CAREFUL! WARNING! CAUTION! WARNING! THIS IS A PROSE NOVEL! THIS IS NOT A COMIC BOOK OR GRAPHIC NOVEL! Written for his father, the late cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz, Monte Schulz's PROSE NOVEL opens in the spring of 1929, as the 19 year old consumptive farm boy Alvin Pendergast attends an ill-fated dance marathon he's too sickly to participate in. After a year of his life has been stolen by a sanitarium, an invitation for a late-night slice of pie is too seductive to pass up and before he knows it, Alvin finds himself up to his eyeballs in horror, beauty, strangeness and death. THIS SIDE OF JORDAN weds the phantasmagoric with the Southern Gothic literary tradition all in search of the common as well as the cosmic satori of our experience. Cover by Al Columbia!

(W) Monte Schulz (A) Monte Schulz (CA) Hieronymus Bosch Once there was a republic of boundless wonder and achievement whose bright horizon had gone dark, soiled by a populace it imagined as undisciplined, unhealthy, feebleminded, and whose very existence stained and subverted a great society. A solution appeared in the furious logic of Biological Dominion that named the ineffectual and weak, the criminally deformed and unwell, as the root cause of this decline. Now, imagine laws conceived in the high halls of government to rid this society of millions deemed infected by a curious disease supposedly responsible for that poverty of health and morality. Next, imagine those millions considered to be unfit and unworthy for daily life loaded onto freight trains and ushered away to perish in distant woods and fields. Imagine more thousands chased into the vast underground of labyrinthine caves and dark catacombs beneath vibrant city streets and lovely city parks to wither away and die. Undercity collects the voices of brave survivors, of those who?ve refused to submit to the indignities of