A. D. Winans will read from his first short story collection, In the Pink — erotic tales released in January by Pedestrian Press with a cover too scandalous for Amazon.com, and thus issued simultaneously in a cover tame enough for that demure literary institution.

For decades, we’ve admired A.D. as a straight talker, poet and West Coast small press publisher of major importance.  The books he put out under the Second Coming Press imprint as far back as the early 1970s did a lot to define an alternative literary sensibility of the times, and his own writings have always cast a jaundiced eye on the presumptions of the moneyed classes, the careerists and the poseurs, expressed with articulate and appropriate contempt.  The things and people he admires and loves get admirably straight-forward treatment as well.

The late Jack Micheline said, “A. D. Winans is a man in search of his soul.  He has great heart and compassion for people and his native city, San Francisco,  I like his uncompromising spirit.  He pulls no punches.”

And poet Neeli Cherkovski notes that “Here is a word-slinger, A. D. Winans…an artful man who makes it all seem so easy, a captive writer in his home port, San Francisco, a voice nailed onto the soil of his native land, capable of writing as he speaks.”

A. D. will be joined in this reading by S.j. Cruz, whose new Pedestrian Press novel, The Flowers Won’t Die, is described as a story of love and art that takes issue with the difficulties of both.  Cruz’s anonymous protagonist speaks every language and knows every pitfall, but never capitulates to the darkness by losing his sense of humor. In The Flowers Won’t Die, Cruz is telling us that it’s next to impossible for our fantasies to become realities, which is why we need those fantasies so much. His Newark, New Jersey is an overboiled melting pot, teeming with shady characters that never cease to be human.

A note to the collectors:  Those buying “In the Pink” will receive a FREE CD of A.D. Winans reading “The Reagan Psalms “(a scathing factual indictment of the Reagan Administration).