PUBLISHER'S INTRO
Roots Digital Ebooks
JULY 14, 2014 / ROZ FOSTER / 0 COMMENTS
Ernest Brawley
Roots Digital Media not only produces films like Tarpit � #‎tarpitthemovie� � it’s also an ebook publisher. Our vision with the ebook imprint in terms of its literary fiction offerings is to digitally publish, sell and champion works of American literature that demonstrate a mastery of quintessentially American English. We’re looking for novels that take pleasure and pride in our cultural story, our history. We’re hoping to ignite in our readers a love for American writing that revels in the pleasures of language, its sound and rhythm, language that takes pride in the idiomatic meaning of American speech.
We’re beginning with Ernest Brawley’s The Rap, a prison novel, inspired by the gritty, action-packed reality of San Quentin in the 60s and by the revolutionary Black Panther, George Jackson. The Rap is a page-turning, character-driven, language-rich novel that raps lyrically about political imprisonment and rails powerfully against governmental corruption, against authoritarian statism—against The Man. If you like Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Cormac McCarthy—authors who write linguistically rich, aggressive, viscerally incendiary and deeply American books, you’ll love Ernest Brawley and The Rap.
Little Arv Weed, a prison guard who hides his mixed race origins, is terrified to live out the drudgery of his American working-class future. He teams up with the political prisoner William Galliot, the dignified, well-educated black revolutionary, to stage an unlikely escape. Meanwhile, Arv’s cousin Wasco Weed, another inmate, the magnificently intimidating leader of the Motopsychos, a drug-running motorcycle gang, has been tasked by no less than the Governor, through the prison’s warden, to assassinate the radical black leader. Galliot’s only real crimes are political. And his most feared weapons are the ability to write and to inspire revolution. Although violently clear lines are drawn between guards and inmates, the narrative describes the terrible reality that, no matter which side of the bars these characters are on, they’re all in prison. And the desperately beautiful horrors at the heart of each are revealed in their lyrical raps, teeming with American idiom, in this brilliant piece of quintessentially American literature.
JULY 14, 2014 / ROZ FOSTER / 0 COMMENTS
Ernest Brawley
Roots Digital Media not only produces films like Tarpit � #‎tarpitthemovie� � it’s also an ebook publisher. Our vision with the ebook imprint in terms of its literary fiction offerings is to digitally publish, sell and champion works of American literature that demonstrate a mastery of quintessentially American English. We’re looking for novels that take pleasure and pride in our cultural story, our history. We’re hoping to ignite in our readers a love for American writing that revels in the pleasures of language, its sound and rhythm, language that takes pride in the idiomatic meaning of American speech.
We’re beginning with Ernest Brawley’s The Rap, a prison novel, inspired by the gritty, action-packed reality of San Quentin in the 60s and by the revolutionary Black Panther, George Jackson. The Rap is a page-turning, character-driven, language-rich novel that raps lyrically about political imprisonment and rails powerfully against governmental corruption, against authoritarian statism—against The Man. If you like Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Cormac McCarthy—authors who write linguistically rich, aggressive, viscerally incendiary and deeply American books, you’ll love Ernest Brawley and The Rap.
Little Arv Weed, a prison guard who hides his mixed race origins, is terrified to live out the drudgery of his American working-class future. He teams up with the political prisoner William Galliot, the dignified, well-educated black revolutionary, to stage an unlikely escape. Meanwhile, Arv’s cousin Wasco Weed, another inmate, the magnificently intimidating leader of the Motopsychos, a drug-running motorcycle gang, has been tasked by no less than the Governor, through the prison’s warden, to assassinate the radical black leader. Galliot’s only real crimes are political. And his most feared weapons are the ability to write and to inspire revolution. Although violently clear lines are drawn between guards and inmates, the narrative describes the terrible reality that, no matter which side of the bars these characters are on, they’re all in prison. And the desperately beautiful horrors at the heart of each are revealed in their lyrical raps, teeming with American idiom, in this brilliant piece of quintessentially American literature.
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