Greg Bottoms – författare

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so be appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster's famous Paradise Gardens, his journey - of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle - is an unparalleled look at the lives and works of some of Finster's contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and neuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy. Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation, Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter's brutal murder.Along the way, Bottoms weaves a powerful narrative, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

A taut, powerful memoir of madness, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into schizophrenia. Beginning with Michael's first psychotic break - seeing God in his suburban bedroom window while high on LSD - Greg Bottoms recounts, in gripping, dramatic prose, the bizarre disappearances, the suicide attempts, and the shocking crime that lands Michael in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison. A work of nonfiction with the form and imagery of a novel, Angelhead enables the reader to witness not only the fragmenting of a mind but of a family as well.

Swallowing the Past is a prose collection about ordinary lives in the ever-changing, postmodern South. A teenage killer ends up a smiling adult bridesmaid. A conservative Christian couple tells the story of a hate crime. A parable about a stolen bike illuminates how lying can be a survival technique. Meeting an old friend at an ATM turns into a meditation on how some people should die. The book closes with 'Grace Street,' a dream-like, genre-defying novella about the author's encounters with the locals on a poor city block in Richmond, Virginia, which becomes an eye-opening look at the old wounds of class, race, religious intolerance, and our particularly American brand of alienation.

One of the most famous political activists of all time, Emma Goldman was also infamous for her radical anarchist views and her “scandalous” personal life. In public, Goldman was a firebrand, confidently agitating for labor reform, anarchism, birth control, and women’s independence. But behind closed doors she was more vulnerable, especially when it came to the love of her life. Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman is an account of Goldman’s legendary career as a political activist. But it is more than that—it is a biography that offers an intimate look at how Goldman’s passion for social reform dovetailed with her passion for one man: Chicago activist, hobo king, and red-light district gynecologist Ben Reitman. Candace Falk takes us into the heart of their tumultuous love affair, finding that even as Goldman lectured on free love, she confronted her own intense jealousy.   As director of the Emma Goldman papers, Falk had access to over 40,000 writings by Goldman—including her private letters and notes—and she draws upon these archives to give us a rare insight into this brilliant, complex woman’s thoughts. The result is both a riveting love story and a primer on an exciting, explosive era in American politics and intellectual life.

Ghosts of My Old Dominion: Memory and History from the New South stares down the long shadow of the Civil War to reveal how the past haunts the present. Author Greg Bottoms writes fourteen autobiographical tales about his experiences growing up in working-class Virginia during the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a meticulously researched novella of the horrors and sorrows Walt Whitman faced while caring for injured Civil War soldiers in Virginia and D.C. _x000D_This ingenious blend of memoir, biography, and criticism uncovers not only the ghosts of history, but the ghosts of a life held together despite it all. Bottoms confronts the legacy of racism in the American South, including his own family's participation in "white flight" and matters of class and religion throughout his formative years, and cuts through the noise of our current era to remind us of essential human things. Ghosts of My Old Dominion is a book of true stories and a book about stories—how the personal and intimate moments in a life are always bled through with the colors of history.