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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:
Lisa Orrell: Publicist
Lisa@PromoteUGuru.com
408-340-8789
Terminally Ill, Award-Winning Author Brings Robert Kennedy Back to Life in Electrifying Novel
October 1, 2010 (Seattle, WA) –
Two and a half years after he was given six months to live, five-time award winning novelist Robert Ellis Gordon has completed Humping Credenzas with the Late Bobby Kennedy: A Convict’s True Account. (Wyatt-Mackenzie, October 2010.) Gordon is a graduate of Harvard and a Huffington Post Columnist who spent more than two decades teaching in the prisons and inner city schools.
The genesis of Gordon’s latest fascinating dark yet humorous tale goes back more than forty years, to Gordon’s upbringing in Massachusetts during the 1960’s. He remembers collecting his paper route money. Many households had a shrine: a photo of the late President Kennedy beneath a photo of Pope John XXIII. But the Kennedy to whom Gordon was most drawn was Robert. “For reasons,” he says, “I only truly began to understand when I reached adulthood. And as with all novels,’ he said, “this one began with a question: By the end of his life had Bobby Kennedy forged a soul so compassionate that it outweighed the sins of the ruthless and anguished young political operative to whom America was first introduced?”
In this riveting tale, Gordon reincarnates Bobby Kennedy and sends him back to earth as a moving man in Seattle who avenges the Mafia boss behind the Kennedy assassinations. The protagonist finds himself in prison, in solitary confinement. There he is tormented by a series of spectacular hallucinations about his past. And the reader is taken on a mesmerizing ride through RFK’s thoughts on politics, conspiracy, family, sex, parenting, remorse, civil rights, Vietnam, and more.
These graphic scenarios range from the very raw to the very tender to the very humorous, featuring an ensemble cast of characters — a salacious chaw-chomping Granny, a sadistic, corndog-scarfing prison guard, and Marilyn Monroe herself. Recipients of preview copies have unanimously agreed that Humping Credenzas is thought provoking, compelling, intricate illuminating.
In a review for HuffPo entitled Searching for Bobby Kennedy: Health Care and the Moral Imperative., columnist Zac Hill writes; “I am twenty four. I don't know the first thing about Bobby or Jack or Marilyn. any of the more famous characters … (Gordon’s book) revolves around. Yet I find myself compelled by this book. Indeed, Humping Credenzas resonates with me on a more fundamental level than almost anything I have ever read.”
In 1993 a small press published a Gordon’s slim novella entitled When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man. The novella caught the attention of reviewers at such major venues as The New York Times (“Compelling”) and Kirkus (“Electrifying... the Yarn to End All Kennedy Yarns.”) The novella enjoyed a brief period of cult status.
Gordon revisited the book some fifteen years later. With regard to length and spiritual depth, the result surprised many, “perhaps the author,” Gordon says, now, “most of all. I don’t view suffering as an end in and of itself. But perhaps understand how Bobby turned his own into visceral identification with the dispossessed.”
Humping Credenzas with the Late Bobby Kennedy: A Convict’s True Account is now available on Amazon and on other major online book retailers.
Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, Inc., ISBN: 978-1-936214-26-6, LCCN: 2010932413, 218 pages, Trade paperback, $14.95, http://www.humpingcredenzas.com
A YouTube Channel has also been created showing short videos from readers of the book, as well as short videos about Robert: http://www.YouTube.com/HumpingCredenzas
For media inquiries, contact Lisa Orrell, Publicist: Lisa@PromoteUGuru.com or call her at: 408-340-8789.
About the Author: Robert Ellis Gordon
Novelist, essayist and Huffington Post columnist Robert Ellis Gordon is the author of The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison (Washington State University Press, 2001), and has written for Esquire, the Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Huffington Post. He is a Harvard Alumni who spent many years teaching writing in Washington State to prison inmates, juvenile institutions and inner-city high schools. He wrote “Funhouse Mirror” while undergoing chemotherapy, collaborating with six of his incarcerated students to let their voices be heard. Gordon is the recipient of numerous awards for his literary work, including the Washington State Book Award. Following his diagnosis with a fatal illness in 1998, Gordon underwent intensive training in Reiki healing and in counseling. Gordon lives, practices Reiki healing and writes in Seattle.
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