Glad Day Books announces the publication of "Broken Trip", a novel by Peter Anastas

April 15, 2004

"The plight of the working poor has made headlines in this election season. Yet who are the people who make up 'the other half of America?' Who is responsible for their fate? And what larger issues of the human condition are raised in the examination of these lives of struggle -- with society, families and themselves--in a changing world? In his riveting new novel, Peter Anastas penetrates the statistics and stereotypes to reveal the plight of the men and women who've been bypassed by the economic boom. The setting is the venerable seaport town of Gloucester, Massachusetts in the 1990's, but it could be any American city whose factories--or other traditional means of hardscrabble survival--are vanishing. Evocative of Pat Barker's novels of working class life in the North of England, the narrative unfolds against the background of a fishing industry in crisis, a city in transition from gritty blue collar to gentrified bedroom. The title, using a local term for a failed fishing trip, suggests the misfortune that besets those who are forced to live on the edge--and the tragedy waiting for some of them. Ten stark black and white photographs of Gloucester by Ernest Morin complement the narrative.

"Author of Glooskap's Children, the book which brought the poverty of Maine's Native American population to public attention in the 1970's, Peter Anastas was born in the city he write about in Broken Trip. His previous publications include Landscape with a Boy, a novella in the Boston University Fictin Series, and At the Cut, a memoir of growing up in Gloucester in the 1940's, along with fiction and non-fiction in Niobe, The Falmouth Review, Stations, America One, THe Larcom Review, Polis, Split Shaft, Cafe Review, and Sulfur. For thirty years, Anastas also worked in the heart of the community he writes about. As Director of Advocacy & Housing, at Action, Inc., Gloucester's antipoverty agency, he experienced first hand the lives described in Broken Trip."

"'We founded Glad DAy Books to publish books like Broken Trip' say writers Grace Paley and Robert Nichols, who launched the collaborative. 'Our aim is to bridge the gap between imaginative literature and political articles and criticism--categories that could and should be marked under both labels. Glad Day believes the departure from fiction that also serves as social criticism has diminished literature and its usefulness to society, while trivializing the telling of stories. In fact, we are restoring an older tradition, offering a politics of hope and a literature of committed responsibility.'"

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Glad Day Books:
Enfield Distribution Company
P.O. Box 699
Enfield, NH 03748
Phone: 603-632-7377
Fax: 603-632-3611
ISBN: 1-930180-11-X
Price: $16.00