An ex-fiend’s blithe imprint on an immigrant’s troubled acclimation canvases 1980s New York City. Roles are reversed when simple contentment and unrealistic discontent switch souls amongst all involved. As the subway doors slide shut, hope rides the third rail.

In Harlem, Billy’s the unlikely winner of childhood bouts against the environment, his family and himself; but his respite is brief in the Bronx. With a hopelessly square boss suddenly coming out of the closet, their teetering store on the Lower East Side provides the common address for business and monkey business for two sailors who jump ship in the New York harbor and disappear into the Greek bustle of Astoria, one of them packing dangerous cargo unbeknownst to the other.

A lonely landlady’s two children take distinctly different paths in life. Her daughter is married to the mob, a virgin sentenced to live a sham marriage on Staten Island, while her son, a freshly minted MD, loses the battle to cancer. The undeclared competition between her daughter and her widowed daughter-in-law turns into a free-for-all when the apartment is rented to a wayward immigrant. Everybody wants to take him under their wing, but the only approval he seeks is that of Billy, the assistant manager, whose own peace is disturbed by his long-time live-in, Ruby. Not so innocuously, she and the widow bring out the best and the worst in each other, while the virgin is no more.

Disco is the flip side of the counterculture coin. In The Stickup Kid, the coin stands on its edge on a fog machine that clouds the dragon’s long winding trail from Asia. The meek shall inherit the loot.

About the Author:

Levent Gulari is an Istanbul born New Yorker. Inspired by the Theater of the Absurd at an early age, he aspires to recreate the offbeat in his experiences—ranging from campus radical to standup comic, blue collar mop driver to semi-conductor engineer—with the one constant in his life: writing. This is his second novel.