The Night Fisher Elegies by Dean Mayes.

September 1st 2022.

I am pleased to announce that my brand new book "The Night Fisher Elegies" is now available across the world and direct from the author.

The Night Fisher Elegies by Dean Mayes.

Taking the reader on a journey through love, faith, death, grief, family and dreams, “The Night Fisher Elegies” weaves together powerful explorations of humanism, moments of reflection tinged with melancholy and short verses, which inhabit the sometimes brutal landscape of self examination.

Dean wanders through a palace of memories contained within nostalgic love, experimenting with style, tone and character. He poses questions for the reader to ponder and wrestle with and offers pieces designed to evoke and provoke, while others are simply present as meditations to inspire and affirm.

Drawing inspiration from literary heroes such as Jim Harrison, Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Camus, Charles Bukowski & Seamus Heaney this collection brings together pieces from over 10 years of writing and creating. “The Night Fisher Elegies” showcases Dean Mayes’ literary style across short fiction, ghazal poetry, short form essays and personal reflections.

Australian customers - I am able to offer a small number of individually signed editions through my dedicated portal. Price includes shipping and handling and will be shipped direct to you throughout September.

Australian Customers - Order Direct from Dean Mayes.

Amazon Australia.

Amazon United States.

Amazon Canada.

Amazon United Kingdom.

Working with Amazon directly on this project has been a positive experience. They've enabled me to deliver something that I'm really proud of.

The Night Fisher Elegies is a different project for me yet, for those of you who are familiar with my previous work, I think you will recognize my voice in these pages. I hope these stories will inspire you.

DFA.

Announcement - New Blog At Wordpress.

This is just a short one to let you know that for the past couple of months, I have been blogging more regularly at a new WordPress site that I've set up. 

The reasons for this come down to visibility. While I have enjoyed a reasonable level of exposure over the past ten years here - using the blogging and site tools provided by Google - I haven't enjoyed the level of engagement with visitors as I'd hoped. 

Having dipped my toe in the water with WordPress, I'm finding a much greater level of engagement with visitors both reading, liking and commenting on my content with a great degree of frequency than I have enjoyed here. 

This does not mean that Dean from Australia is going away. I will continue to maintain this site as the primary home for my career as an author. For news, updates and reflections on what I am doing as a writer however, I would invite you to visit my portal at Dean Mayes Author. You can sign up for updates (and, to be clear, I'm no spammer!) and you can receive exclusive news on my forthcoming projects before anyone else. 

For those of you who have interacted with me by way of this website over the past ten years, I'd like to sincerely thank you for doing so.

DFA.

All The Better Part Of Me - A New Release from Molly Ringle.

There's always cause for celebration whenever Central Avenue Publishing launches a new novel from Seattle based author Molly Ringle. This is especially true for Molly's latest offering "All The Better Part Of Me" that is due to hit stands on September 3. I had the opportunity to participate as a beta reader on an early draft of this outstanding new novel and I'm so pleased to see it come to life in its final form.

What's it all about? 

It's an inconvenient time for Sinter Blackwell to realize he's bisexual. He's a 25-year-old American actor working in London, living far away from his disapproving parents in the Pacific Northwest, and enjoying a flirtation with his director Fiona. But he can't deny that his favorite parts of each day are the messages from his gay best friend Andy in Seattle—whom Sinter once kissed when they were 15. Finally he decides to return to America to visit Andy and discover what's between them, if anything. He isn't seeking love, and definitely doesn't want drama. But both love and drama seem determined to find him. Family complications soon force him into the most consequential decisions of his life, threatening all his most important relationships: with Andy, Fiona, his parents, and everyone else who's counting on him. Choosing the right role to play has never been harder.

Who is Molly Ringle?

Molly Ringle was one of the quiet, weird kids in school, and is now one of the quiet, weird writers of the world. She likes thinking up innovative romantic obstacles and mixing them with topics like Greek mythology, ghost stories, fairy tales, or regular-world scandalous gossip. With her intense devotion to humor, she was proud to win the grand prize in the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with one (intentionally) terrible sentence. She's into mild rainy climates, gardens, '80s new wave music, chocolate, tea, and perfume (or really anything that smells good). She has lived in the Pacific Northwest most of her life, aside from grad school in California and one work-abroad season in Edinburgh in the 1990s. (She's also really into the U.K., though has a love/stress relationship with travel.) She currently lives in Seattle with her husband, kids, corgi, guinea pigs, and a lot of moss.

My take...

Stylistically, this new novel is signature Molly Ringle, from its smart dialogue to its grounded and recognizable characters and its rich and evocative Pacific North West setting - honestly, why Molly has never been tapped to write for a Gilmore Girls-esque TV series is beyond me. Where "All The Better Part Of Me" represents a departure for Ringle is in its handling of a Male to Male relationship - one that is sensitive, deep and enriching, both for the story and for the reader.

During my beta read, Molly and I had a back and forth during which we remarked on how similar the experience of writing outside our familiar cultural sand box was for us both. I recall Molly fretting at times about whether she was unfairly appropriating a narrative in portraying a gay relationship from a heterosexual perspective - in much the same way as I worried about writing an Aboriginal story from a non Aboriginal perspective with "Gifts of the Peramangk". 

Molly's approach to the central relationship between Sinter and Andy has been handled with such a deft hand that you soon lose yourself in their love story, forgetting any baggage that may or may not come with the genre. As I have often said of Molly Ringle - she is an astute observer of the human condition and, as a storyteller, she is able to tap into something universal, no matter what genre she is writing within. All The Better Part Of Me brings together everything that makes Molly Ringle's writing so appealing and then goes further, exploring love and family and the politics of love and family in a smart, engrossing tome that will leave you heartily satisfied.

Pre-Order Purchase Links: 

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Book Depository

Indiebound

Kobo

Audiobook 

Where Molly Ringle Can Be Found:

Amazon

Blog: Mirrored here and here 

Facebook

Goodreads

DFA.