$13.00
In stock (can be backordered)
In June of 2023, Black Lawrence Press welcomed numerous existing and forthcoming Nomadic Press titles to our catalogue. Low Village was originally published by Nomadic.
Low Village explores the symbiotic relationship between dominant and submissive personalities: fathers and sons, hustlers and hoes, hunters and their human prey—characters consumed by ambition and wracked with guilt.
Daniel Riddle Rodriguez’s Low Village maps uncharted territory. These are streets you’ve never seen, characters you’ve never met, captured in a musical vernacular bristling with energy. Rodriguez neither judges nor glamorizes the world he describes so vividly. He turns an unflinching gaze on the bonds between human beings invisible in mainstream American fiction: a boy initiating a younger friend into the life of crime, two wannabe actresses turning tricks, an addict stealing his dying grandmother’s Demerol, a boy observing his alcoholic father, a girl undone at an End of the World party. This is a book like no other. Don’t miss the debut of this electrifying new talent.
– Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl
Low Village is about as high as you can get on my list of things to read. If it’s fiction you like, quick paced with the tempo of our times, the beat of our streets, without fakery, all natural, all real—this is the chapbook for you. Rodriguez deals with the streets and the people who run them, and the love in families that goes deep and hurts, and the confusion of being alive without a definite purpose but to make it the next day—no, the next moment. His characters ache and want more and fuck up and come back up again. It is all about where he’s been, what he’s seen, lived and endured, transmuted by his talent into pulsing gems. They’ve got life, these stories, and heart, and intelligence, and exquisite craftsmanship. Daniel Riddle Rodriguez is a genuine talent off to a fabulous start.
– Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of The Mexican Man in His Backyard and winner of the American Book Award
Daniel Riddle Rodriguez’s stories thrum with electric, dense sentences you’ll stop and read again out of awe and delight. But they’re not pretty for pretty’s sake; they build to bursts of heartbreak as his village of desperate and downtrodden, mordant and wise, characters hustle to survive. Searing, dark, and astonishingly new, Low Village is ugly-pretty at its finest.
– Kara Vernor, author of Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song
Daniel Riddle Rodriguez’s Low Village is the best kind of fiction: visceral, devastating, hilarious, and full of heart. The stories in Low Village douse you with ice water and then wrap you in a towel, whispering, I’m sorry, shhh, into your hair. Read on for truck stops and grandmas, End of the World parties and Demerol lemonade. Rodriguez is a compelling new voice in fiction, and fiction is innumerably better for it.
– Ruth Madievsky, author of Emergency Brake
$13.00
$15.95
$15.95