Bare Branches

by Mike Kennedy

Overview

One-child rule & female infanticide unbalances the population, forcing one hundred thirty million men to live as BARE BRANCHES. Chinese scientists race social upheaval. Agents scour the globe to harvest cells. In America they hunt for Sally Luck. We dispatch a single agent only. Preferring close quarter combat to gun fights, Jillian defiantly recites Aeschylus and Shakespeare amid feats of arms..

Cai Ling Luk was raised a princess by Chinese aristocrats whose fathers fled China when Mao Zedong defeated the nationalists in 1949. Her aloof parents allow her to choose her college. She moves to America and changes her name to Sally Luck. And then, angry over pain and the foolishness of men, Sally choses hysterectomy as elective surgery, and then spends the rest of her life regretting it--until technology and global politics intervene. Soon, her children will number in the millions and she will fall a year behind in naming them, sorry for those with just a number.

Jillian de Guerre lost her father when she was five. He was a professor at Syracuse University bringing his 35 undergrads back from Britain aboard Pan Am Flight 103 when the Arabs blew it up over Lockerbie. Now all grown up, it is normally the body-count that interests Jillian. She works alone. She doesn't like to share.

The story mounts twin-scaffolds: A chronicle of wished-for love and busted love, of love postponed, and of love made pure by heat. And then, slipped among the pages like bookmarks, is a picture of the Lower Keys before Hurricane Irma wrecked them: its dive boat captains, its tiki bars, and adventure dives that the tourists never saw; in a land that's mostly sea; and in a sea that's mostly sky.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940046097788
Publisher:	Mike Kennedy
Publication date:	08/29/2014
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	343 KB

About the Author

FICTION FOR THE SPOKEN WORD – Full length recordings of contemporary American short stories by Mike Kennedy – Paste this link into your browser >>> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMX-gWZQGvdo9xovZTl-ZOA

Indianapolis author Mike Kennedy described by Trident Media Group, saying: Kennedy has a way with words and that readers attracted to Hemingway and Mailer will love Season of Many Thirsts (A novel brought to E-Books under the original title: REPORT FROM MALI). Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says of the manuscript: "This is a potentially important and significant novel on many levels, including formally." Little, Brown says of the novel: "Our admiration for its ambition and the energy and high-octane force it applies toward these engrossing geopolitical events. Chance and his team are memorable characters." Random House says: "Kennedy captures the strange, and intriguing world of Mali." Playwright Arthur Miller said of Kennedy: "Marilyn and I used to think there was something funny about Mike, and then we realized that he was simply hilarious."

Kennedy's message to the publishing world, "I have read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from time to time across fifty years. During this, my most recent reading, it occurs to me that I am Kurtz and that all of you are Marlow. Kurtz lay dying in the pilot house of the river steamer. Marlow, the company agent, has found him and returns with him. Kurtz has spent years in the jungle pulling out ivory and sending it downstream. Finally, Kurtz agrees to return down river to civilization because he realizes that he has something to say, something with a value beyond his ton of treasure. Kurtz realizes that he has achieved a synthesis from out of his brutish experience. Kurtz imagines being met by representatives at each one of the string of railway stations during his return to civilization. He tells Marlow, 'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' And then, sounding as though he steps into our own millennium, Kurtz adds, 'Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.' Now I see that Kurtz is Conrad. Kurtz is not unique. He is every writer. It is only Marlow, the agent, who is unique, unique in his fidelity, not just to the job, nor only to the company, but to the civilization that sent him.

Postscript: Borrowing the words of Shakespeare's character of Henry the Fifth, to those among you who believe that reading may “gentle their condition,” I submit that the future of American fiction lies in your hands. New York publishing & agenting is deep in turmoil of its own creation (by means of corrupt gatekeeping). Therefore, the position of Curator of Letters is yours, or else is left undone.