M. Thomas Gammarino

Big in Japan

M. Thomas Gammarino

“From Susie Wong to Madame Butterfly to Miss Saigon: you might think that we've had enough of American men adventuring, scoring, and coming undone in the Far East. But you'd be wrong. Gammarino's Big in Japan is a shrewd and lively book, sharp-eyed and unsparing in its account of a young American's good and very bad moments overseas. The writing is wired and the ultimate judgement is merciless. It's seductive and it's devastating.” —PF Kluge, author of Eddie and the Cruisers and Gone Tomorrow While playing to lackluster crowds in their hometown of Philadelphia, progressive rock band Agenbite clings to the comforting half-truth that they're doing better in Japan. When their manager agrees to send them over on a shoestring tour, though, they're swiftly forced to give up their illusions and return stateside.All but one of them, that is.Brain Tedesco, the band's obsessive-compulsive nerve center, has fallen in love with a part-time sex worker – the first woman ever to have touched him – and his illusions have only just begun. What ensues is a gritty coming-of-age tale in which Brain, intent on achieving some kind of transcendence, paradoxically (or not so paradoxically) descends into the Hungry Ghost realm of Tokyo’s underworld. He becomes, in effect, a gaki – the insatiable creature of Buddhist cosmology – and must learn how to live even as his outsize desires threaten to engulf him.By turns compassionate and ruthless, erotic and grotesque, riotously serious and deadly funny, Big in Japan is a sparking, gut-wrenching, face-melting debut novel.

King of the Worlds

M. Thomas Gammarino

This dark comedy explores the lost universes of disgraced idol Dylan Greenyears. Dylan had always wanted to live as many lives as he could—that was the appeal of being an actor. But at the end of a brief stint as a Hollywood heartthrob, Dylan loses the lead in [i]Titanic and exiles himself and his wife to a recently settled exoplanet called New Taiwan.At first, life beyond Earth seems uncannily un-wondrous. Dylan teaches at an American prep school, raises a family with his high school sweetheart, and lives out his restlessness through literature. But then a box of old fan mail (and the hint of a galaxy-wide conspiracy) offers Dylan a chance to recapture the past. As he tries to balance this transdimensional midlife crisis against family life, Dylan encounters a cast of extraordinary characters: a supercomputer with aspirations of godhood, a Mormon-fundamentalist superfan, an old-school psychoanalyst, a sampling of his alternate selves, and, once again, the love of his lives.[i]King of the Worlds throws cosmology, technology, nineties pop culture, and religion into an existential blender for a mix that is by turns tragic and absurd, elegiac and filled with wonder.[b]M. Thomas Gammarino is the author of the novel [i]Big in Japan and the novella [i]Jellyfish Dreams. His short fiction has appeared in the [i]New York Tyrant, [i]Tinfish, [i]Word Riot, and the [i]Hawai'i Review, among others. In 2014, Gammarino received the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, Hawaii's highest literary honor. He lives and teaches in Honolulu, Hawaii.