Books

Marty Martinez thinks his life can't get any worse... when it does. 'Grace Period' is a profound, sometimes hilarious novel about living with serious illness; and finding that at the precarious edge of life there is not only pain and loss, but hope, a chance at redemption, love, and even happiness.

Gerald Haslam picks up where Mark Twain left off in this career-spanning collection of stories and essays brimming with life—only here is Kern County instead of Calaveras, Oildale instead of Nevada City, a great alligator hunt instead of a celebrated jumping frog.

'Straight White Male' is a moving and powerful account of middle age and the heart-wrenching complexities of family life.

Half-Anglo and half-Chicano, Manuel Ryan struggles with discrimination from both sides of his heritage while trying to handle junior high and girls. Is it any wonder he needs a madman to help make sense of it all?
A humorous novel about and for teens.

In the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, Gerald Haslam's redoubtable Tejon-Club Gang returns the tall-tale and the bumpkin-humor traditions to their proper places in American letters ... where ever that is! The gang manages to poke holes in social trends and elitist assumptions -- and in their own prejudices -- while bumbling from one beer-fueled misadventure to the next.

Adapted and illustrated by Garth Haslam.

Thwack! Pow! Productions, Box 984, Penngrove, CA 94951, 1994.
Gerry's most anthologized short story presented in comic-book form for beginning readers.

Haslam explores the rural areas and small towns of his native region — California's Great Central Valley — in this collection of twenty-five short stories. The author’s triumph in these stories is that, by making us care about his characters and their habitats, he allows us to care more about ourselves and our land.

These stories tell us what life is like in the regions of California and the West where drudgery characterizes each day, where 'menudo para desayuno' or biscuits and gravy replace champagne brunch... of the quintessential California of working people who struggle to make a living.

In these stories, Haslam portrays rural people struggling to make something of themselves and to live with dignity in the raw American West. Most of these tales are set in what critics have called "the other California" -- poor, tough, crafty, and often desperate.

Everyone knows California, bleached blonde and surfer country. In fact, what most people "know" is the media image of a narrow coastal strip that runs roughly from San Diego to Marin County. However, the Golden State is not a single, homogenous region. Instead, it is a group of diverse places, other places, gathered within arbitrary boundaries under a single name.

Haslam's writing is regional without being parochial. 'He sings the song of the West, but it is not a traditional ballad. Instead it is the howl of the wind fraying the nerves of the complacent, the slap that awakens the dreamer.

Duck Down Press/Windriver Books.

In the blistering heat of a San Joaquin Valley summer, Junior Ward learns a lesson that is hardly new or unique, but one that at least some members of every generation must discover afresh in endless patterns and variations: you can’t go home again.

Those who fled to California from the Oklahoma dust bowl of the 1930’s as children -- and their children who were born in California, as well -- are the "Okies". Poor, culturally diverse, and discriminated against, these people struggle against the fearful elite, against one another, and with their own capacities for love and hate.