New Oliver Mayer Collection is Out and Available on Amazon!

I am very excited that the volume of works by LA Playwright Oliver Mayer, The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer's Early Works [+] Plus, that I edited is out and available on Amazon.com. The anthology has the full scripts of Blade to the Heat, Young Valiant, and Joy of the Desolate, in addition to critical essays by Howard Stein and Jorge Huerta and interviews, photographs, poetry, and theater ephemera from Mayer's private collection. More on the book is available here.

Mayer's work embodies the XicanOsmotic throbbings I began documenting in the final pages of Tex[t]-Mex, mixing, breeding, fusing aesthetic dramatic traces from Latin America, Mexico, the United States, and beyond. Mayer's blend of eros, violence, machismo, macha divas, show business, and Chicano angst are hard to beat. He really is one of our unique American writers.

Check it out if you can!

If you are travailing in academe and would like to review the book for a journal just send me an email the next time you get a chance and I will work with our crack staff at Hyperbole Books to see that you get a review copy! You can peek at the first 31 pages or so here! ¡Gracias!

If you are reading this and live in the Bay Area, make your way over to Thick Description for its revival of Blade to the Heat, now in production. Here's a quick take on what's presently going down Thick! Lastly, pay no attention to rumors you might have read concerning Madonna and the film version of Blade'--for the moment, at least, she is pursuing other pieces.