Readings
5.12.13 The Maple Leaf, New Orleans, 3 p.m.
5.15.13 The Rusty Nail, New Orleans, 7 p.m.
5.21.13 3rd Place Books, Ravenna, Seattle, 7 p.m.
6.22.13 Elliott Bay Books, Seattle, 7 p.m. **Official Launch!
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“A candid, bracing memoir of love, addiction and self-destruction……As elemental, lyrical and cringe-inducing a love story as they come.”
-Kirkus Reviews
Read the full Kirkus Review Here
“Eli Hastings will make you fall in love — and then he will punch through your ribcage and rip your heart out — and by the end of his moving memoir, Clearly Now, The Rain, you will thank him for it.”
- Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Red Moon
“Hastings writes a graceful, unbiased portrait of someone whose self-destructive fate cannot be altered and he does so with incredible power and sensitivity. “Clearly” is a hypnotic, surreal, and lyrical testament to the capacities of friendship and the outer limits of love. By the time you reach book’s end, the enigmatic Serala will be impossible to shake from your consciousness.”
- Margaux Fragoso, author of Tiger, Tiger
“In electric, adventurous prose, Eli Hastings’ Clearly Now, the Rain tells the story of loving one wrecked soul, and the rich, dark wonder of the joys to be found along the way.”
- Paul Lisicky, author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder
“Clearly Now, The Rain is a wonderfully seamless story that orbits around a young man’s passion for a tragic young woman. But no matter how strong the devotion, no matter how intense the commitment, this memoir is a disturbing confirmation of how the power of addiction all too often overwhelms even the greatest love. Hastings writes from the heart, with unnerving honesty, and a remarkable sense of compassion.”
- James Brown, author of The Los Angeles Diaries and This River
“Clearly Now, The Rain is an unflinching account of how it feels to be young and flirting with the abyss in America. The narrator’s observations as he and his friends ride rough across the U.S.A., all pulled to orbit around their friend, lover, and lost soul, Serala, are also an investigation into the dangerously different ways that people respond to addiction. This is an elegy, yes, as if told by a boy who began his quest tutored by Kerouac’s ghost, but became, on this hard road, a man schooled in love by the spirit of the Dalai Lama.”
- Rachel Rose, author of Giving My Body to Science and Notes on Arrival and Departure
I met Serala Advani while visiting the college where she was enrolled in 1996. She was drawn together like a bundle of sticks on a desk chair in pajama pants even as the poisonous Southern California sun set over her shoulder. She leaked Marlboro smoke from her nose and stared me down. I was frightened and thrilled and could not have said why. I entered the same school the following year.
Memoir/Elegy from ECW Press.
