Fantagraphics is making a leap on May 30, as they will release Monte Schulz’s This Side of Jordan, over at the 2009 Book Expo in New York City!
This Side of Jordan is a story set in the Great Depression, following the travels of 19-year-old farmboy Alvin Pendergast. Alvin has spent a year in a sanitarium for tuberculosis, and encounters many of the con men and criminals of America’s seedy streets.
This is the second prose novel that Fantagraphics has ever released, after Alexander Theroux’s 2007 book, Laura Warholic. Monte Schulz is the son of famed Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.
“When I was in my early twenties, and Dad saw that I was developing an interest in writing, he showed me some of the beautiful passages of Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck, and lent me his copies of Complete Poems by Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Schulz wrote in a press release. “He told me the writer’s gift is to be able to express for people certain ideas and emotions they cannot express for themselves.”
