Fiction. Detroit in the 1950s: real estate booming, fat cats selling homes fast and furiously to veterans, working hard now in the Ford assembly plants. It's just before a real estate crash and this novel's characters swirl around its high stakes and impending doom. Eugene, leaving a Detroit orphanage at 18 and aiming for college, teams up with fellow orphan and developer Elton, who's out to make millions. If young Eugene reveres the orphanage director Kate Wyman, Elton pursues her as prey, in hopes of acquiring the orphanage property along the Detroit River. Enter collegiate Eugene's mentor at Wayne State, a black professor whose actress wife wants to buy a Victorian home in the white heart of the city. Elton's strategy is to profit from anything he can, from white flight to middle-class black aspirations. And real estate comes to reflect the dismay and deceit we've known in more recent times. A Detroit native, Leo Litwak brings his world vividly to life.

Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

A recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Leo Litwak has written two novels, two works of nonficition, a short story collection, and articles in publications including The New York Times Magazine, Tukkun, and Esquire. In 2001, The Medic, his war memoir was one of the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle Books of the Years. A professor at San Francisco State University for more than thirty years, Leo Litwak lives in San Francisco.