Books by Joe Amato

I can think of no other writer who can better express the ine able sense of being born into the working poor before moving through di erent genres of living-hired factory hand, engineer, professor, poet, then back to hired academic hand-as he searches for a sense of the real through genres of writing-memoir, ction, poetry, criticism. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure is as engrossing as any written lived experience, only more so: a meditation on what it is not to be a Hollywood celebrity, war hero, or anyone of note, but a human trying to make it, and trying to make sense of "it" as a writer who can look back and see how much of our lives are composed by the constraints of storytelling we and our societies create. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure begins with poetics, but ends as philosophy.-STEVE TOMASULA, author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Once Human: Stories

A failed professor, Samuel Taylor is haunted by the premonition that in attempting to write out of his system the circumstances surrounding his failure, he'll only find himself at the mercy of another system, language itself. Each iteration of his creative effort, whether centered around seemingly mundane activities such as driving or manual labor, or scrutinizing the current cachet of rock climbing, illustrates that while experience might preempt artistic aspiration, those who are wedded to the demands of literary art are at its beck and call. By turns comic and tragic, Samuel Taylor's Last Night asks us to consider what it means to be a writer first and last.