Welcome to Oakland

Eric Miles Williamson's Out of Oakland is the book the Beats would have written if their privileged upbringings hadn't sent them to the Horace Manns and Columbias of the world. Seldom a book comes along that walks into your comfortable suburban living room, grabs you by your designer lapels, and screams in your face, "This is the truth, man."

Williamson unabashedly tells us the truth as he sees it in all of its filthy, stinking beauty. While other authors struggle to find the politically correct décolletage of an adjective to make their point, Williamson shoves his in your face with a fist-strangled bouquet of malodorously delicious prosody. He introduces readers to the underside of Oakland's elite, hard-working blue collar men and women and leads a new generation to Jack London's 21st century's People of the Abyss.

In Out of Oakland, East Bay Grease's loveable T-Bird Murphy returns grown and struggling with new and adult adventures. Yet, as Williamson takes us on the whirlwind ride of exquisite expletives and jack-hammered pounding prose through T-Bird's streets of Oakland and to the liquor soaked stools of Dick's Bar, he is redefining American literature and letting T-Bird weave the tale.

Reminiscent of Zola's LesRougon-Macquart, Williamson's Oakland Trilogy (East BayGrease, Out of Oakland, and Oakland, Jack London, and Me) shows us the insidious world of conniving ex-wives, the romantic loyalty of hard-drinking, pickled-livered construction workers, and the tumult of living on the edge of Oakland's abyss. He does it with a verve and determination lacking in today's pedantically written, woe is me personal essays of tragedy and addiction. Which good ól T-Bird Murphy and Eric Miles Williamson will tell the sycophants of today's tawdry letters, "Get over it."