Here's Lora Mathis (doing a reading backed by music from Matty Terrones) and here's the nice blurb Lora wrote for my new book After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different which is out on National Adventure Day, January 5th, 2022, via Three One G and Bread & Roses Press.
"After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different is a love letter to the ephemeral, to San Diego, to a place and time Gnade once knew and loved deeply. Reading this book is like sharing a delicious meal with a friend, and having a deep, hours long conversation that food can bring about. Gnade makes it easy to listen to him. I read this book while scrambling eggs, devouring pasta, waiting in a drive through line, and washing the dishes. I didn’t want to put it down. These were not my friends Gnade was describing. It was not my family nor my childhood, and yet, I felt a bond. I wanted to know what happened to these fleeting faces. I wanted to share a burrito with them and listen. This book is a way of splitting a steaming, grease-stained bag of burritos with a friend while staring out at this ‘shit world.’ Gnade names it as such and gives readers sights of death, pain, and selfishness as proof. But through and through, he hangs onto his optimism. The world contains a glimmer of hope in it, he urges. If you look for it. And Gnade looks deeply. He takes readers down the back paths of his memory and allows them to pull back a curtain to peek inside. Childhood is spread across the scene, and then adulthood. Childhood moments are catalogued with Gnade’s reflections on life. He speaks to the reader, the eternal you, with a sense of earnestness that tinges on desperation at times. He is trying to get through to the reader, to you, and to really be heard. Gnade is urging a more steadied sense of attention; a care and curiosity for the world, and a sense that there is magic out there—even if it is hiding. This book will make you sentimental for days past. You will want to call your old friends up and tell them you love them, or at least invite them over for a meal. It will make you wish you were from San Diego. I am. And the burritos are just as good as Adam describes them."
