With Death Laughing

“There are two characters at the heart of Peter Plate’s With Death Laughing. One is a just-sprung ex con turned bell-ringing street priest. The other is an elusive halfway house diva named Sugar Child who is forever jacked up on psyche meds. We are at first tempted to write them off as a pair of losers. But as Plate takes them through the slow–motion train wreck of their struggle to live, to love, to aspire, to matter, in a world too otherwise occupied to care, he ultimately reveals their humanity. With Death Laughing is a crime novel in which writing anyone off is, in itself, the crime.” —Lee Stringer, author of Grand Central Winter, Sleepaway School and, with Kurt Vonnegut, Like Shaking Hands with God

“Like a nightstick upside your skull, Peter Plate’s prose makes the stars explode behind your eyes with his deft street corner delivery.” —Gary Phillips, The Be-Bop Barbarians

“Plate is to San Francisco what Hubert Selby Jr. is to New York: a gritty, honest speaker for the grimy masses.” —Willamette Week

“[Peter Plate’s] San Francisco is a fiery hell, where the devil rids in a squad car, and God doesn’t deign to put in an appearance.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Named Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning with Black Wheel of Anger (1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir “psychic histories” of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.

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