Tag Archives: Books

Copperas Cove

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So my sexy tall blonde wife is calling this my best work.  From my point of view, it’s hard to say when a piece of me is attached to all my novels.  It’s like choosing a favorite from among your children, impossible indeed.  But you might enjoy a story about a guy whose wife caught him in the shower with another man, who is struggling with his sexuality while investigating a murder and searching for the right woman in a small town in 1950s Mississippi.

AVAILABLE ON KINDLE HERE

Jonathon’s marriage crashes around his head when his wife finds him in the shower with another man.  Exiled to the streets, he leaves Pittsburgh to start a new life on the Mississippi Gulf coast.  Followed by phantoms from the past, he sets out envisioning blissful solitude and long lazy Saturdays on warm southern beaches.  Maybe he can find a drugstore in Biloxi that needs a pharmacist.  Maybe, if he meets the right woman, he can get these misguided notions about men out of his head.

The generator on his ’48 Ford coupe goes out fifty miles south of Tupelo, a long hot three mile walk to the next town, an isolated hamlet called Copperas Cove.  Temporarily stranded, he finds himself having a hamburger at Rexall soda fountain, unaware that his destiny is taking shape in the mind of a young woman three stools down.  Betty Marie, the quixotic town flirt, has taken an interest in him.  Jonathon soon learns, if he’s looking for a job as a pharmacist, he came to the right place.  Old man Peterson, the Rexall’s ancient pharmacist, has been wanting to retire for years  Betty Marie quickly points out, that other than a beach, they don’t have anything in Biloxi he can’t find right here in Copperas Cove.

READ CHAPTER ONE

Simpler times in another era.  An age old dilemma.  A small town in the deep south. A brutal rape and murder.  An exiled husband facing life-changing events.  The bigoted dramas of 1950’s Mississippi.  Ingredients all for a witches brew of emotion, mystery and intrigue.  Copperas Cove weaves an unpredictable thread through the lives of all concerned, a thread that leaves no one unchanged.

AVAILABLE ON NOOK HERE

 

A Part of My Soul

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For someone that writes novels, hearing from readers who have enjoyed a book and are asking for a sequel is an author’s greatest reward. I’ve had that privilege with A Song in the Park, so here it is … part two, the sequel.

By the end of their first summer together, having learned Michael has a fifteen -year-old son, Michael and Justin decide their only option is to fly to Boston and bring the boy home to Big Bend.  The boy’s mother, Michael’s best friend in college, had died in an auto accident and his aunt is planning to send him to military school if Michael doesn’t want him.  Just as the realities of raising a teenager begin to change Michael’s life, a ghost from the past comes back to haunt him.  His future medical practise, and his hopes and dreams of building a charity clinic rests on the outcome of a pending trial.  Nevertheless, life goes on in the desert paradise of Big Bend. Not until Michael’s rebellious son meets a girl after he starts school, do things finally start to normalize between father and son.

A tale of two men, of love and relationships both fragile and strong, A Part of My Soul brings back all the familiar faces, the glorious sunsets, the star filled nights and the vast panoramas of far west Texas.

Now available on:

Kindle

Nook

Available in paperback on Amazon

All other ebook readers

Novels About Like-Minded Men You’ll Love

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Thinking about reading a Martin Brant Novel?

A review of A Song in the Park

Mr. Brant is a superb author, a man versed in the fine tuning of your heart. This was another “can’t-put-it-down” book. The reading is light, though Mr. Brandt has a vast knowledge of human nature. You won’t be overwhelmed by a vocabulary which will make you put down the book. In saying that, I don’t want to reflect on Mr. Brant’s intellect. Obviously it is very high.

It is a story of love…a mélange of emotions between a black man, a white man, two white women and a Latino PLUS a little 4-legged heart thief named Perk. If you are looking for a novel with “kinky” sex on every page, this is NOT a book to read, although it does contain physical love. It is primarily a story of love between two men…then a white woman and a Latino fall in love. The beauty of tolerance unfolds on every page. There are times when tears ran down my cheeks and times when my heart was warmed with joy and happiness

Mr. Brant had an insight into my very being by his statement, “My heart searches for a haven away from small minds.”

HAVE A BIG MIND AND OPEN YOUR HEART TO TOLERANCE AND LOVE. Remember, every last person on this planet wants to be loved. Let your heart and your mind be toyed with a little bit. You will reap a great investment and walk away with warmth in your soul.

Larry Tomaw

Paperback

Kindle

All other E-book versions

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The Strange Haunting of Johnny Feelwater

A review on Amazon

I thoroughly enjoyed The Strange Haunting of Johnny Feelwater. Savannah (Georgia) and Kenya come alive in author Martin Brant’s descriptions. The diverse cast of characters is compelling, and the suspense is built-in by the multi-sensorial descriptions of a haunted house filled with a range of unsettling beings, and by the question of what kind of intriguing “debauchery” Johnny will be coerced into next!

Johnny stumbles into a sticky web of relationships between his wife Marilee, the otherworldly siblings Julian and Cassandra, and his new friend Brian. Ultimately he realizes an important difference–love–between the nature of his relationship with Brian and that of his relationship with Julian. Marilee opens up to her body and its responses thanks to Johnny, and Johnny finally learns the reason for Cassandra’s revenge.

The ending is a terrific wham/bam whirl, with one surprise after another in the last few pages, including a main character’s deus-ex-machina solution, very nicely done.

The Strange Haunting of Johnny Feelwater is a portentous and philosophical novel, not to be confused with barely-sketched characters ripping each others’ pants off. Sure there’s sex: the erotic massage scene is riveting, and the leather “heathen” sequence appropriately disgusting yet compelling! But beyond this, Brant’s writing expertly explores the “haunting” of bisexuality: a phantom sex hovering in the wings, an obsession never completely conquered in the heft and smell of remembered flesh. At times the novel seems to confirm the common perception that bisexuality is merely the mid-life crisis of married men who realize they’re gay. But at other times, we read and understand the circumstances of characters for whom bisexuality is not a transitional phase, but a way of life.

Highly recommended, suspenseful, beautiful writing.

Paperback

Kindle

All other E-book Versions

SMASHWORDS…The easy-to-use Ebook Store

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Ebooks for any electronic device known to man.

Martin Brant novels are now available on Smashwords.

Click the book description for a direct link.

Five like-minded married men discover the joy, the mystery and the consequences of acting on their urges.

Two men, troubled by their past, cross paths where the desert and mountains meet the sky.

A World War II tale about the French Resistance, a dangerous assignment, and the drama of human endurance and passion.

After nine years of marriage and inheriting a house in historic Savannah, the phantoms of Johnny’s past force him to face a long-buried secret.

Short stories about human diversity and the vexing riddles of human sexuality.

Read Kindle Books on your new iPad

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Want to read my novels on your new iPad?  Just  follow this link and download the free app.

Just in time for the iPad’s release, Apple has approved an update to Amazon’s Kindle application to include support for the iPad (iTunes link).

The Kindle app is optimized for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, providing users the ability to read Kindle books using a beautiful, easy-to-use interface. You can discover and read over 450,000 books in the Kindle Store, including the latest best sellers and new releases. You can also read your Kindle books on your Mac, PC, BlackBerry, Kindle, and Kindle DX. Amazon Whispersync automatically syncs your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across all of your devices, so you can pick up right where you left off no matter what device you are reading on.

Notably, the app is a “universal” application, meaning the same application can be used across all iPhone OS devices including the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

Amazon had previously announced that it was preparing an iPad-optimized version of it’s Kindle software, which will now compete with Apple’s iBook application.

Continue reading →

Not Your Everyday Erotica

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FrontCover2_ 265x419_EroticTales

Life changing circumstances are what makes a story interesting. Stories that lay bare the grit and muscle of life are the stories I like to read.  Tales that get into the essence of a character’s soul.  If you feel the same way, Erotic Tales for Enlightened Minds is for you.  It’s available at Amazon, both in a paperback version, and on Kindle.

You can now download a Kindle reader on your PC, free, and read any book available on Kindle.  Here is the link: FREE KINDLE READER

Middlesex

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I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

So goes the opening sentence of Middlesex, a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.

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From Jeff Turrentine, The Los Angeles Times: “Eugenides has had nearly a decade to relax, and the happy result is a novel that’s as warm, expansive and generous as its predecessor wasn’t. (…) Among many things, Middlesex is the author’s love letter to a city that could probably use a few more. (…) Middlesex isn’t just a respectable sophomore effort; it’s a towering achievement, and it can now be stated unequivocally that Eugenides’ initial triumph wasn’t a one-off or a fluke. He has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being.”

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A review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann on Amazon.com:

From the first sentence of Jeffrey Eugenides’ MIDDLESEX, I was hooked by this complicated tale of a young girl who grows into a man. The story of Cal Stephanides begins generations before his birth, in a small Greek village, when his grandparents succumb to incestuous desires. Immigration to the United States keeps Desdemona and Lefty’s secret intact – until their grandchild Cal reaches puberty. Told with both humor and earnestness, the story grows more engaging with every page.

The brilliance of this book emerges not from the superficial story of a hermaphrodite but from the context – historical, scientific, psychological, political, geographical – of Cal’s birth and subsequent rebirth. MIDDLESEX is about much more than gender confusion. Cal’s mixed gender can be taken as a metaphor for the experience of first- and second-generations born of immigrants.

While the context of this story provides the substance, the characters provide the vibrancy. Cal emerges as a reliable and likeable narrator. He is sensible, good-humored, and intelligent. The spectrum of his experiences provides a smooth transition between childhood and adult, enabling the reader to embrace the character as both male and female. Cal’s family is affectionately portrayed, even with their failings. (Cal’s brother, Chapter Eleven, annoyed me with his name, a running gag, but even he ended up a full-blooded character by the end.)

Eugenides has written an expansive, compelling book. Despite its length of over 500 pages, the novel is not a slow read – unless the reader wants it to be, to make it last. Accessible, intelligent, well-paced and plotted, it should appeal to a wide range of readers.

I can’t recommend this novel highly enough.

Mother nature can be an inventive force, even cruel (considering the eye-of-the-beholder). In Cal’s case, the narrator and main character in Middlesex, he was born a hermaphrodite.  After his confused early years, he learned to accept his condition, even cherish it, though it led to challenges most of us can’t begin to imagine.

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Cal tells us his family history which leads to why he emerged in the world with characteristics of both sexes.  He tells us about his emotional and confused early years, his challenges and trials, his failed romances, and then how he came about to accept his unique fate.  It’s a must read for anyone looking for something different.