The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.

Blood of Heaven, The

Literature & Fiction

Kent Wascom

United States

BRILLIANCE AUDIO ^

New Orleans, May 1862. The largest city in the ill-starred Confederacy has fallen to Union troops under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin "the Beast" Butler. The city is rife with madness and rage. When 12-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws into the unrest his mother, Elise, a mixed-race woman passing for white, and his father, Angel, whose long and wicked life is drawing to a close. What follows forces mother and son into a dark, new world: Joseph must come to grips with his father's legacy of violence and his growing sentiment for Cuban exile Marina Fandal, the only survivor of a shipwreck that claimed the lives of her parents. Elise must struggle to maintain a hold on her sanity, her son, and her own precarious station but is threatened by the resurgence of a troubling figure from her past, Dr. Emile Sabatier, a fanatical physician who adores disease and is deeply mired in the conspiracy and intrigue surrounding the occupation of the city. Their paths all intersect with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, a man history will call a beast but whose avarice and brutal acumen are ideally suited to the task of governing an "ungovernable city." Alternating between the perspectives of the five characters of Elise, Dr. Sabatier, Joseph, Marina, and Butler, Secessia weaves a tapestry of ravenous greed and malformed love, of slavery and desperation, set within the baroque melting pot that is New Orleans. A Gothic tableau vivant of epic scope and intimate horror, Secessia is the netherworld reflection of the conflict between North and South.

Secessia

Literary

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Literary short stories by established and emerging writers.Excerpts:
David McDannald Stealing Chickens I don't know why he said such things. You have a principle of being honest and then there's the hard reality of your mother having a heart attack.
 R. Cross Glioblastoma "You're totally f--ed." "As in dying?" "As in that, yes."
 Wesley Straton Earthquake Whisky When he tells these stories, they could be from someone else's life: in New Zealand he is quiet, and he expects the country to be quiet in return. Generally, it obliges.
 Clark Knowles In Dublin It was terribly quiet, impossibly so for such a big city, with so much unfolding everywhere, with so many intersecting lives.
 Scott Gloden The Birds of Basra "Online! You can go online and find exactly where you're from. That's how I learned I was Mexican," she said.
 Katrin Gibb A History of Regressing Our move from Chicago to a newly developed suburb in Kentucky meant little to me at that age, but my brother was going into high school that fall and responded by throwing his fork across the room.
 Abhijith Ravinutala A Pothole for Sailaja Sailaja did not admit to being a particularly religious person, as she took pride in her computer engineering degree and equated it with a necessary suspension of superstitious beliefs.
 Laura Roque Lady-Ghost Roles I was always relaxed by Delkis's house, ongoing fights or not, with its distant rumble of laundry, like a whale constantly clearing its throat below us.
 Ben Nadler Shalom Bayit I used to get a lot of drinking done while she wrote reports. Now, there was nothing to do but go to sleep.
 Michael Caleb Tasker All Gone Now By early afternoon the heat was crushing. When I was younger it used to rain every afternoon.
 Kent Wascom Interview by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais I like having the prompt of history. History can give you a narrative shape, and finding the shape of a story is the most difficult thing for me.
 Peter Sheehy Things Frozen Then We'll meet dogs, we'll meet neighborhood people. The flowers will begin to bloom. I will remember these walks until I am as old as he is and maybe longer.
 David Ebenbach All of This Is Water "You're all quite welcome." She stepped back from the door and sort of bowed us in. It was the first time in my life that knowing a Finnish person had made me a VIP.

Glimmer Train Stories, #105

David Ebenbach

David McDannald

R. Cross

Wesley Straton

Clark Knowles

Scott Golden

Katrin Gibb

Abhijith Ravinutala

Laura Roque

Ben Nadler

Michael Caleb Tasker

Peter Sheehy

Glimmer Train Press, Inc.

The Blood of Heaven

GROVE PRESS

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Books by Kent Wascom