TOWARD A NEW NARRATIVE - SLY BANG

"TOWARD A NEW NARRATIVE: SLY BANG REWRITES, rethinks, and reimagines how we conceive of narrative. This slippery novel is a major step forward towards a radiant and explosive language. - Dean Kostos, Pierced by Night-colored Threads

SLY BANG NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

My new experimental novel, Sly Bang, is now available from Amazon SLY BANG ON AMAZON

Larissa Shmailo’s SLY BANG is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battlefield of the psychosexual female libido.
Cecilia Tan, author of Slow Surrender'

SLY BANG IS ASTOUNDING! The "typhoid Mary of rape and murder," having been determined by alien pterodactyls to be "the only non-Nazi in the universe," teams up with a skinner-alive of pubescent virgins and ardent collector of Rothko daubs. Together they wage war against an ialdabaoth who intends, just for kicks, to atomize the universe by means of particle accelerators. Hyperspatial scene-shifts are conveyed by telepathy or supercomputer-assisted dialogue that bristles with snappy one-liners paced faster than a meth rant. Somehow, across these solar system-spanning pages, supercharged as they are with psycho-, neurobio- and quantum-physical erudition, the plot comes across vivid as anything Tolstoy ever evoked with his most considered panoramic prose. Larissa Shmailo's SLY BANG is like nothing that has ever been seen, or heard, anywhere.
Tom Bradley, author of Useful Despair

In this breakneck, futuristic, socio-sexual-psychological thriller, Larissa Shmailo tells the story of Nora Volkhonsky, a smart FBI agent targeted by multiple evildoers. As bad guys and worse guys close in on her, Nora’s main goal is to survive. She is helped somewhat by her “telepathic” powers, but her experience is often more dream than reality. “Who was sending these clangs and hoodoo messages? Who was receiving hers? Who wanted her insane or dead?” Fasten your seatbelt as you ride along a wicked highway with SLY BANG’s tough, spirited heroine.
—Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Border Crossings

SLY BANG TO BE PUBLISHED BY SPUYTEN DUYVIL

My second novel, Sly Bang, will be published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2018-19! Thanks to publisher Tod Thilleman!

Excerpts from Patient Women in the international arts journal Alephi

Very pleased that these excerpts from my novel, Patient Women, appear in the international arts journal Alephi:Patient Women excerpts

Patient Women now available from Barnes & Noble

Buy my new novel about sex addiction and recovery here!
Patient Women

What readers are saying about Patient Women!

What readers are saying about Patient Women:

Dive into the deep end: read this novel! Unforgettable and mesmerizing!

There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. Patient Women is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by Patient Women. WOW!!! Unforgettable!

—Meg  Tuite

If you are in any type of recovery program, you will recognize the characters in this book as people you know. I read the erudite blurbs on the back, which would scare away most of the people I know [who] would find it a fascinating and compelling read. It may be a 'literary novel', but it reads like real life, reads like the lives of the people I know. Recovery friends, we are in this book! Great job award goes to the author!

—Yoby Henthorn

Christ-figures are likely to be cross-dressers in this engaging bildungsroman, which takes us on a wild ride through NYC nightclubs of the 1970's, rock-bottom blackouts, a whorehouse, and the slogan-filled rooms of recovery. Surreal and lyrical, then bawdy and riotous, then plainspoken and tragic, Patient Women had me rooting hard for its lovable, drowning heroine to keep her head above water and let in grace. —Anne Elliott, author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

Nora, born to a holocaust survivor mother, finds herself, at the threshold of adolescence in “boring Queens.” Lying about her age, her first transgression from her mother’s iron rule, she begins a series of ill-fated attempts to put distance between herself and the familial web she so desperately wants to disentangle from. She reels from one dysfunctional relationship to another, druggies, pimps, losers, and masochists, searching for her lovable self. This novel unfolds in a whirlwind that is sometimes her present. Be ready to have your heart broken and then made whole. —Bonny Finberg

Larissa Shmailo’s newest work, Patient Women, is an unflinching exploration of the lasting damage some people can inflict on their children. Nora, Shmailo’s protagonist, evolves as she struggles to understand and heal her own self-hatred and her on-going self-destructive choices. Slogging one's way through a morass of denial and repression is a strong trope throughout this raw, honest book. Nora is fiercely vulnerable and the sympathetic hero of her own salvation. This novel is dark, but there is hope that even the pain one lives through can cause one to create, finally, lasting and beautiful art.

—Joani Reese

Patient Women on Amazon

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