Riverdale Author Perry Brass Finalist for Prestigious Book Award

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(I am sending the complete release of a story I just sent you: this has contact information as well. PB.)

Belhue Press

2501 Palisade Avenue, Suite A1

Bronx, NY 10463

718 884-6606

belhuepress@earthlink.net

Riverdale Author Perry Brass Finalist for Prestigious Book Award

Belhue Press is pleased to announce that Perry Brass’s novel KING OF ANGELS, A Novel About the Genesis of Identity and Belief (Belhue Press, 2012, 366 pages, $18.00) a coming-of-age story set in 1963, the year of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, has been named a finalist for a 2013 Ferro-Grumley Award from New York’s Publishing Triangle.

The Ferro–Grumley Awards, made possible by the estates of novelists Robert Ferro (The Family of Max Desir) and Michael Grumley (Life Studies) and funded and administered by the Ferro–Grumley Foundation headed by Stephen Greco, were first awarded in 1990. 
The Publishing Triangle, a professional organization, has been associated with them since 1994. 
The purpose of these awards is to honor culture-driving fiction from LGBT points of view. Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards, Inc., and the Publishing Triangle have collaborated in soliciting submissions for awards and in hosting an awards ceremony since 1994. The finalists and the winners are determined by a panel of judges appointed by the Ferro-Grumley Foundation. Winners receive $500. Previous winners of the Ferro-Grumley Award have included: Peter Cameron, (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You), Christopher Bram (Exiles in America), Edmund White (The Married Man), Michael Cunningham (The Hours), Colm Toibin (The Story of the Night), Andrew Holleran (The Beauty of Men), John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), Randall Kenan (Let the Dead Bury Their Dead), Melvin Dixon (Vanishing Rooms), and Dennis Cooper, (Closer).

Born in Savannah, GA, Perry Brass has been a resident of Riverdale since 1993, and lives in the historic Villa Charlotte Bronte co-op apartments on Palisade Avenue. He and his partner were “vacated” from VCB by the NYC Dept. of Buildings, after Hurricane Irene in August of 2011, for a period of 11 months. During this time he worked on KING OF ANGELS, which follows Benjy Rothberg, the resourceful 12-year-old son of a successful mixed Jewish/Protestant couple during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement in the South when another community, that of gay men, was starting to emerge out of violence, darkness and hatred. To please his Jewish father, Benjy has been sent to Holy Nativity Military Academic, a Catholic school run by a strict by compassionate order of monks. At Holy Nativity Benjy will encounter murderous bullying and the closest friendships of his life. He will change the lives of several people and see his own existence changed as his family’s comfortable lifestyle is destroyed and he has to learn to face life on his own, but with the help of people he has learned to trust. Southern/Jewish literary critic and blogger Amos Lassen (Amoslassenreviews) has said about King of Angels, “I love this book. It’s the book I wanted to write.” San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter compared it favorably to John Irving’s new book In One Person, and the Lambda Literary Foundation’s newsletter called it a “comparable to To Kill a Mockingbird.”

The Ferro-Grumley Award and other literary awards administered by the Publishing Triangle will be awarded on Thursday, April 25, 2013, at 7 PM at the New School’s Tischman Auditorium (66 W. 12th Street, NYC). The Awards ceremony and the reception afterward are free to the public. For more information: www.publishingtriangle.org.

Riverdale, Southern Jewish, Savannah, Ferro-Grumley Awards, Perry Brass, Riverdale authors, Bronx writers

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