Gretchen McCullough – författare

The Wondrous Springs of Balmorhea focuses on the secrets at Balmorhea Civilian Conservation Corps camp in remote West Texas, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal program in 1935. It is now 1976 and Sam McCabe, a lawyer who lives in South Texas, has just had his arm and shoulder amputated. In the twilight of his life, he remembers those pivotal years. He has strange, disturbing dreams about Darlene, the sultry nurse at the camp. The boys at Balmorhea pine for Darlene, but she is really Minnie, who assisted her husband, Dr. John Brinkley. Brinkley who promised greater male virility with goat testicle operations was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of men. Sam McCabe, company clerk to Commander Captain Bell, is privy to most of the intrigue at the camp. Captain Bell, a World War I veteran, an amputee with a disfigured face, cleverly sidesteps federal dictates about segregation to protect the African American cook, Devilfish, and his band, blues musicians from Deep Ellum. Sam’s sidekick, E.O., the pious bookkeeper is running a gambling ring to fund his wedding plans while Jack, Sam’s best friend from Sul Ross College, a Casanova, is having a torrid affair with Darlene. Meanwhile, Sam befriends Chueco, a Mexican American boy who has escaped a life of slavery at the mercury mine at Terlingua. Close to the big inauguration day for the pool, though, tragedy strikes.

Shahrazad’s Gift is a collection of linked short stories set in contemporary Cairo—magical, absurd and humorous. The author focuses on the off-beat, little-known stories, far from CNN news: a Swedish belly dancer who taps into the Oriental fantasies of her clientele; a Japanese woman studying Arabic, driven mad by the noise and chaos of the city; a frustrated Egyptian housewife who becomes obsessed by the activities of her Western gay neighbor; an American journalist who covered the civil war in Beirut who finds friendship with her Egyptian dentist. We also meet the two protagonists of McCullough's Confessions of a Knight Errant, before their escapades in that story. These stories are told in the tradition of A Thousand and One Nights.

Confessions of a Knight Errant is a comedic, picaresque novel in the tradition of Don Quixote with a flamboyant cast of characters. Dr. Gary Watson is the picaro, a radical environmentalist and wannabe novelist who has been accused of masterminding a computer hack that wiped out the files of a major publishing company. His Sancho Panza is Kharalombos, a fat, gluttonous Greek dancing teacher, who is wanted by the secret police for cavorting with the daughter of the Big Man of Egypt. Self-preservation necessitates a hurried journey to the refuge of a girls’ camp in rural Texas. Then a body turns up nearby that is connected to Middle East antiquities, and they are on the run once more.

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