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Greg Herriges

Greg Herriges's Streethearts is available on Amazon.com and on Barnes and Noble.

Greg Herriges's The Bay of Marseilles and Other Stories is available on Amazon.com.


Streethearts

John Spector is a seasoned high school teacher with 22 years in the trenches of a ghetto school filled with struggling teenagers, gangs, apathetic students— but also students "who make an indelible impression, kids with souls and hearts as big as the world." We get the whole spectrum from Spector, a brave and decent soul, a soft touch, too nice, too caring perhaps. Herriges spent many years as a high school teacher. He brings substance and legitimacy to Streethearts. The authenticity of his narrative comes across in every line of every page, many of them packed with witty and sparkling dialogue, at times genuinely humorous, occasionally grim or even horrific, but always candid, always down-to-earth, always reliable.

  

Praise

Shrewdly written, its style rich but minimal without being minimalist, its language bursting with street-smart wisdom, Streethearts puts us on the inside track of what it really means to be an inner-city educator trying not only to teach but to survive what is an increasingly menacing world loaded with poverty, misery and violence. The hard-won truths we learn from Spector are more than enlightening, they're intellectually life-altering. The book is a triumph and should be required reading for anyone who thinks he has the answers as to why so many of America's schools are failing.

—Duff Brenna, author of Murdering the Mom

Herriges’s writings will make you remember the breaking and the mending of your heart. From quirky post-modern tales to gritty depictions of street life, Herriges’s writing alternates the humorous and the tragic, though is always intensely imaginative.

—Thomas E. Kennedy, author of The Copenhagen Quartet



The Bay of Marseilles and Other Stories

These stories, Greg Herriges says, were born of individual, fleeting glimpses and memories, seemingly unbound by any linear reason. But once they were arranged in this collection, the recurring themes were evident—of desire and loss, of the intense isolation each of us necessarily endures and struggles with, as well as the redemptive—if sometimes elusive—power of love. Some of the stories are new, appearing here for the first time in print; others were published before on either side of the Atlantic. All of them evidence the expansive range of Herriges’s imaginative vision, the distinctive richness of his voice, informed by the conjoined power of his musical and literary talents and experience. Greg Herriges’s stories will make you remember the breaking and the mending of your heart.

  

Praise

“This is a brilliant collection of stories, precise in details—about possibility and yearning and loss and intimacy—and sweeping in scope. What a fine, fine book this is. One of Herriges's best.”

—Tony Romano, author of When the World Was Young

“This accomplished collection by Greg Herriges is an enjoyable and worthy read. With stories that range from sensitive depictions of young people on the cusp of their adolescence to those that render the fraught relations between adult men and women, Herriges humanely portrays life's ‘loss of sweetness.’

—Bruce F. Mueller, co-author, Critical Companion to J. D. Salinger: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

Praise for previous books:

“Above all else, Herriges is a comedic writer of considerable talent.”

—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

”The writing is funny and offbeat...Greg Herriges is an agile writer. He can swing from ghetto reflexes to uptown chic.”

—Brent Spencer, San Francisco Chronicle

“...this is one of those rare contemporary novels brimming with humor, life and reality.”

—Publisher's Weekly

Information about the Author

Greg Herriges began writing professionally in his twenties with an investigative report on gangs for The Chicago Tribune Magazine, “Inherit the Streets.” Soon afterward, he met with his literary hero, J.D. Salinger at Salinger’s home in Cornish, New Hampshire, a meeting that resulted in his first national publication, a profile/interview with the iconic author. It decided Herriges to turn to fiction writing, and years later inspired his book-length JD: A Memoir of a Time and a Journey (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2006).

He is the author of novels, short stories, and articles, as well as a series of literary DVD documentaries, including Thomas E. Kennedy: Copenhagen Quartet, and the award winning TC Boyle: The Art of the Story.

His short works have appeared in Story Quarterly, The Literary Review, The South Carolina Review, The Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, and Great Britain’s Popular Music and Society and World Wide Writers.

He is currently a professor of English at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Illinois.

His new ebook novels Streethearts and Lennon and Me are available in ebook shops everywhere.

  




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