In this compelling memoir, John Skoyles guides us through 1960s New York. Caught between his uncle Fred, a mob associate and man-about-town, and his aunt Linda, a secretary at Paramount Pictures on Times Square, the sixteen-year-old finds himself exploring everything from the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan's Upper East Side to the flophouses and haunts of Forty-second Street. Secret Frequencies spins in graceful turns from deadpan hilarity to unflinching bleakness as Skoyles encounters New York's most comic, absurd, and sometimes dangerous seductions. John Skoyles is the author of a...

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Alan Dugan described Skoyles's poems as "clear-eyed but passionate, sarcastic but grave, all at the same time." That description holds true for this selection of poems from his previous four books: A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul, and The Situation. The title, taken from the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, alludes to the temporal quality of existence, how one moves from sunlight to twilight in the course of a lifetime. And how those evening hours arrive suddenly, as if in no time at all.

Praise for John Skoyles:

Economy,...

The poems in Inside Job range from intensely autobiographical lyrics to brief historical portraits of literary figures like Grace Paley and Jorge Luis Borges, to obituaries of idiosyncratic characters such as heavyweight boxing contenders and inventors of candy bars. The tone is often wry, sometimes wistful, and always compassionate.

Praise for John Skoyles:

For poems so full of linguistic playfulness, there is a surprising accuracy of perception. --The Georgia Review

Wise, benevolent, witty. --Northwest Review

Skoyles scrapes at the surface of everyday things and finds a...

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. THE NUT FILE captures a world desperately trying to make sense of itself, the frantic regions of lives lived, including that of the author, whose portrait is drawn by the selection and composition of the assembled stories. Comprised of original as well as appropriated material -- obituaries, academic emails, private notes, micro-fictions, literary excerpts, weird memos, police logs, hard news, dear Johns and autobiographical confessions -- the entries range from the absurd to the grave, from the ambiguous to the bombastic, from the ironic to the...