“There is nothing more wonderful than the café, and the tales that are drawn from them.  Long live the café, whether found on the dark backstreet, the fashionable thoroughfare, or the pages of a book!  Within them, as through these tales, we gain entrance to the history of a world where madams rub shoulders with mystics and visionaries with vagabonds.” — from the introduction by Patti Smith.

Tales from the Eternal Café, author Janet Hamill’s debut short story collection, offers a thrilling, unwinding trail of tales that excite and mystify, drift then deliver a powerful punch that readers will devour. Seventeen stories lure readers into a labyrinth of surprise and suspense, with humor lurking just on the other side of pathos, a tear just moments away from bright, well-deserved laughter. It is an unleashing of an incredible imagination through noir-like, neo-surrealistic tales of passion and mystery. As Katie Farris, author of boysgirls raves, “Hamill’s mysterious tales are peopled by restless, worldly souls grappling with love, art, and death, glimpsed as if from between the columns of the Coliseum or in the maze of Morocco’s medina. These interludes are often left unresolved, adrift in time, as if the characters, having surfaced just long enough for us to see their colors, had submerged again—back to their dazzling, bohemian lives.”

Click here to read more on Janet’s book.  She’s on tour out of New York with stops at Bird & Beckett, Book Soup in LA and Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA.  Read here for a profile that will give you a good sense of the writer (and be advised that the reference to Orange County isn’t the SoCal one we love to hate).  Lastly, click here (or on the photo just below) to hear the author’s long-time buddy Patti Smith read her introduction to Janet’s book.

Click on photo to hear Patti Smith read her introduction to Janet Hamill’s “Tales from the Eternal Cafe”

Poet, writer, performer & artist Janet Hamill published her first book of poetry, Troublante (Oliphant Press), in 1975, followed by The Temple (Telephone Books), Nostalgia of the Infinite (Ocean View Books) Lost Ceilings (Telephone Books), and Body of Water (Bowery Books). Body of Water was nominated for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Prize.

She has read at venues including The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, The People’s Poetry Gathering, The Walt Whitman Cultural Center, the WORD Festival, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Knitting Factory, CBGB’s Gallery, the Nuyorican Café, Central Park Summer Stage, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, the Andy Warhol Museum, Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival, the Liss Ard Festival in County Cork, Ireland, Patti Smith’s Meltdown Festival in London, the Latitude Festival in Southwold, England, and Liverpool’s Heartbeats series.

She has released two CDs of spoken word and music, Flying Nowhere (Yes No Maybe Records) and Genie of the Alphabet (Not Records), in collaboration with the band Moving Star (Jay LoRubbio, guitar; Bob Torsello, bass; Greg Feller and Sean Healey, drums; Evan Teatum, keyboards). Flying Nowhere was produced by Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith band, Suzanne Vega, Nuggets) and executive produced by Bob Holman (Bowery Poetry Club, The Collected Call of the Wild); it featured cameos by Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith (Horses, Auguries of Innocence). Genie of the Alphabet (Not Records) was self-produced and featured cameos by Beat legend David Amram (Pull My Daisy), Steve Franchino, Bob Holman, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith and Judith Tulloch.