The adventures of young Willie Smith as he grows up in small-town America playing baseball and trying to learn what it means to "be a man." This novel engages the reader in the feel, sights, sounds, and smells of playing baseball: of playing the old game, not watching it on TV. Partly a comic coming-of-age story and even an apprenticeship novel, White Shoes shows the struggles of school, of growing up in a single-parent family, of emerging sexuality, and of trying to find one's place in the world, experiences both universal and individual to every human soul. From the first spring baseball of Willie's freshman year to graduation and hopes for something beyond the baseball diamond and the confines of Harmon Falls, a fading Midwestern coal and steel town, E. S. Louis brings people and town to life in an exploration of ways of life both past and yet still alive in more than memory, in how so many of us still experience the world. As a work of "Men's Studies," an offshoot of the increasingly popular field of Gender Studies, White Shoes asks essential questions about learning how to grow up to be a good man; as a work of postmodern fiction it treats narrative playfully and with humor.
Author Biography
Edward S. Louis' books include Odysseus on the Rhine (the story of Odysseus' adventures after he returns from Troy), The Monster Specialist (the story of Sir Severus le Brewse, knight of King Arthur's court, and the sorceress Lilava, his partner in love and adventure), The Streets of Harmon Falls (a collection of poems about the small town in which White Shoes takes place), and the forthcoming Wiskalo Chookalo, a ghost story set in Depression-era Wisconsin. He lives in Wisconsin with his artist wife, Kristy, and his house lion, Bingley, and teaches literature and writing. Please see his short story "Little Fotungus" in the 2017 edition of The Long Story. Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She is currently teaching college English at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Previously, she taught for three years at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014). She published two poetry collections Improvisational Arguments (Fomite Press, 2011) and Battle for Athens (Anaphora, 2012). She also released two historical novels: The Romances of George Sand (2014), and The Battle for Democracy (2016). She published two fantasy novellas with Grim's Labyrinth Publishing: The Great Love of Queen Margaret, the Vampire (2014) and The Campaigns against the Olden: Kingdoms of Laruta (2014). She also wrote and illustrated a children's book, The Sloths and I (Anaphora, 2013). She has been editing and writing for the independent, tri-annual Pennsylvania Literary Journal since 2009, and started the second Anaphora periodical, Cinematic Codes Review in 2016. She has presented her research at the MLA, SAMLA, EAPSU, SWWC, BWWC and many other conferences. She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and Brown University Military Collection fellowships.
