Product Description
In this acclaimed first novel---winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction 2008, and finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction---the course of growing up in just-this-side-of-segregation 1970s Cincinnati, Ohio, seems predictable if uninspiring for Cliffy Douglas. That is, until the deadbeat father of this gifted 13-year-old black kid from the Findlater Gardens Projects appears out of nowhere. The real fun and trouble begin when Noah, a Jewish boy he meets in junior high school, takes him on a joyride to lust and first love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN NOVEL
No doubt Shawn Stewart Ruff has had lots of practice in his short story writing at making every word count, because in his first effort at writing a novel, FINLATER, there doesn't seem to be one word too many or one word too few throughout the piece.In fact, he seems to already be a master at saying exactly what he wants to say with a minimum of the words needed to say it.And each time, he hits just the right note to make this reader know exactly what he means.It is one of those books that if you're like me, you'll hate to put down when you finish it.You'll want more just like I do; I can hardly wait for his second novel.

I place this book right up there in my estimation of the greatest novels written with gay coming of age characters. It has a scene in it that is every bit as good as the scene in James Baldwin's GIOVANNI'S ROOMwhere the narrator begins the scene by saying, "I have not thought of that boy-Joey-for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight."That scene ends with this statement, "It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love."In between those two sentences is some ofthe most beautiful language I've ever read and that scene has stayed with me since I first read it.I've compared other similar books looking for a scene that favorably compares to the writing I found there and I discovered this one in FINLATER.(Ruff also writes in first person narration.)The scene begins like this, "We showered together, sucking each other in the spray.It was fun and crazy and so real.Realer than anything I had ever done before."The scene ends like this, "I felt more than myself, greater than myself.I was all that I could ever be in that moment.I was in love."And, again, in between that beginning and the ending of that scene were words that described all the hope, ache, and joy of being in love for the first time.I have a new measuring stick with which to compare writing. I have a feeling that it may be a long time before I find a third one just as it took me this long to find one as good as Baldwin's prose.

It's not really necessary for me to give a synopsis of the storyline because others have done that quite adequately already.I will say this though.You will fall in love with these two teenagers, I did.I remember thinking when I saw the film ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, who are the really insane characters in this film?In FINLATER, you will, like me, begin to think, who are the real grownups in this novel.But, when you look really closely, you'll find that none of the characters escape being marvelously flawed in the same way that all real people are flawed.I put the book down when I finished it, knowing that I had just met and shared the lives of living, breathing human beings.I'm eagerly awaiting more of the same from Ruff.

Finlater
In 292 pages, Ruff creates a world which is at once familiar and foreign.A world in which the distinctions between "good" and "bad" are blurred and little is certain.Ruff's writing is refreshingly real.Everything from the setting to the language to the emotions felt by characters are believable.

Ruff tackles the important, yet difficult, issue of xenophobia in a way that is direct and at times shocking.Characters from all backgrounds are caught making stereotypical assumptions and using offensive expressions in reference to other characters or situations.For example, when Cliffy asks the school librarian about Jews, she says: "Just like I never hated your people.As long as you weren't dirty and foul-mouthed."

Many readers will be offended by one or more of the comments made in the text.This technique allows the reader to experience, through the characters, being simultaneously victim and perpetrator of xenophobia.This is a major innovation of Ruff's writing.

Finlater is best-suited for mature readers.The book is filled with sexually-explicit references which do not detract from the theme, but would not be appropriate for younger readers.

Stylistically, Finlater deserves accolade.The book is beautifully published on high quality paper with a relatively large and easily read font.The book is divided into short, easily-manageable chapters, which are perfect for busy readers.In my experience, though, once you begin reading Finlater it will not be easily put down.

Whose life is this?
Having grown up in a trashy little all-white town in Oklahoma, I find it amazing that the author has created an urban Black adolescence that feels like my own life. His extraordinary sense of those telling details that comprise our most vivid memories make his story as vivid as your own recollections. Amazing, erotic, and sometimes unbearably honest.

An amazing read
Ruff has written something remarkable that manages to transcend setting, sexuality, or race.

Believe the hype: this may just be the best novel of the year.

Book explores carnal realms many publishers fear. Reviewed by Jim Bartley / Xtra.ca / Wednesday, July 02, 2008
It's the spring of '69 in Cincinnati. In the bathroom of a cramped house in a barren housing project, a black kid of 13 is soaking in the tub, hearing the screen door slam as a mystery guest is greeted by his mom. Moments before, Cliffy stood naked at the bathroom window watching a dark, nattilydressed man pull into the parking lot in a low-slung T-Bird. "He turned up our sidewalk.... Our eyes locked in the tug of gravity -- the little body me, the big body him, in a pull like the moon toward the earth or the earth toward the sun, or me toward fried chicken legs, my favourite thing in the world."

Two pages in and I was hooked on this writing. Cosmic homoerotic magnetism and fried chicken legs? It's a giggle -- but so much more. We feel the swirling, unformed passions of a child teetering on the threshold of sexual awareness. A page later, the silk-shirted dude is standing over the toilet and Cliffy is mesmerized. "His thick gold-ringed fingers unpacked his privates from tight black polyester pants. He maneuvered it until a red head came out." The guy turns out to be Cliffy's dad, absent for a decade. He pisses a golden stream, repacks his tool, then hoists Cliffy up for a kiss on the cheek: "Give your old man some sugar."

Dad decides to stick around for a while. He even gets a job, still managing to pull all-nighter debauches, stumbling into the kitchen next morning while Lacey (mom) is dispensing Sugar Crisp to her brood of three boys. At home dad is found mostly on the couch in his tight bikini briefs, watching TV and ordering beers and snacks from his grudgingly obedient sons.

Lambda-shortlisted editor Shawn Stewart Ruff has given us a gem with this first novel, woven through with insights about oppression and prejudice, hurt and healing. Cliffy's first-person voice is surprisingly seductive. He's a convincing kid in every way while doubling as a near-flawless vehicle for his author's wisdom about pubescent boys and their surging sexuality. One scene, in which Cliffy is affectionately manhandled by his father on the couch, is intensely erotic. You see that both Clifford and Cliffy, dad and son, are briefly immersed in a sexual game that's over almost before it begins -- too soon even for them to acknowledge it. But we sense that dad is playing with fire.

A few pages later Cliffy is riding double on the banana seat of his new friend's bicycle, his arms tightly around Noah's waist. The thrill of their erotic tug feels just right: "The wind flapped his shirt up. Sweaty hair vanished into Fruit of the Loom underwear elastic above the studs on his stained Big Hank jeans. Oil, mud, arm stink and Captain Crunch cereal swirled around me in tornados of smells." I instantly recalled that same cereal breath and boyish sweat wafting from my pals at summer camp.

Cliffy and Noah later share an outdoor jerk session. It's the beginning of a love affair that pulls us deep inside their hormone-charged dance of discovery and desire. The sex is as tender and green as spring growth in an asparagus patch. Noah is Jewish and part of the friendship is a growing, reciprocal awareness of the shared tragedy in their ancestral histories. Harassed in the street by kids recycling their parents' intolerance, they are all the more determined not to let prejudice pull them apart. In a touching emotional climax one morning Noah bursts into tears as he meets Cliffy for some renewed outdoor dick-play. Noah's dad has just had a messy mental breakdown and been taken to hospital. "Noah cried. His face puckered and turned bright red. He made dog-like whining sounds. I put my arm around him and then I began to cry, and get a hard-on at the same time." Some teens shout at them from a passing car: "Look at the Jew-Nigger lovebirds."

Ruff bowled me over with this scene (and many others.) What gets me here is the incongruous hard-on. It's funny, but it also proves beyond a doubt Cliffy's unshakable bond with Noah. Body and heart -- his whole being -- hum with need and tenderness. Then the heartless abuse from outside reminds us that love is always endangered. Does that sound a tad overwrought? Well, the novel is the complete opposite. This book rings with authenticity, exploring carnal realms that too many publishers simply won't go near. Bravo to Shawn Stewart Ruff and to Quote Editions for bringing his gift to us. ... Read more

Product Description
From highly acclaimed author Shawn Stewart Ruff comes a fearless new novel set in New York City two weeks into the nightmare of the World Trade Center s destruction. For Ivy-educated, HIV-positive African-American poet Yale Battle, the will to go on since the death of his lover -- a famed Alvin Ailey dancer and choreographer and casualty of AIDS in the early 1990s-- is never more acutely tested than when the city he loves is engulfed in grief. Wandering the memories of Yale's old life, and deep in the terror of a drug and sex odyssey that lands him in jail, Toss and Whirl and Pass ponders the nature of eternal love and celebrates the city of dreams. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Transcendent and Down to Earth
Grady Harp has already ably given us the plot highlights, but I want to share with you some feelings I have about this work, a book that is more than brilliant, but genuinely worthwhile.

The contradictions are palpable: the gritty sex and the soaring poetry, right there on the same page.Like steel and concrete skyscrapers exploding into dust.Like a lover's embrace fading into a chilling absence."All that is solid melts into air," Marx said of our contemporary predicament... and with good reason.

As with Ruff's first novel, Finlater, he offers a singular, fully realized character who nonetheless needs and loves an Other.Here the special character is the frustrated writer Yale Battle, and the Other is dancer and choreographer Courtney Arrington (and I was about to spell that "Arrogant"... I think Ruff is doing a little Dickens there).Their love is round-and-round passionate and intense.

That solidity-turned-granular, that round-and-round spinning is captured by the title and by the shifting back-and-forth through time in the text.Again, the contradiction: the result is a feeling that Yale and Courtney's relationship is a collection of isolated, fleeting moments... and yet utterly timeless, something that will always accompany Yale after Courtney's death.

Oh oh, you may be thinking, I see lots of ideas and feelings and metaphors here... but what about characters?Ruff is a masterful creator of memorable characters, including a trove of secondary people who are delightful to experience as individuals even as they mirror and magnify the primary characters' struggles.

Also, as with Finlater, I have to remark on the quality of the book production.Get a physical copy if you can: it is a work of art that manifests in its heft, its fonts, its pagination style, that sense of constant movement.

Finally, let's just look at one bit of the novel... it leaves you with questions that have no easy answer, even as the novel ends on a hopeful note.Here Yale has joined Courtney as his manager on a demanding dance tour.Courtney says to Yale,...

--- "Thanks for putting up with me." [Courtney] seemed suddenly embarrassed, even ashamed. "Don't let me push you around.You do what you feel is best.Always."[Yale thinks:] I didn't know how to respond. ... [Courtney:] "Hopefully, it ends up being material for you.Fodder for your writing, huh?I mean, I've loved you being here, but I want there to be something in it for you." --- [Yale responds:] "Maybe... But I'm not thinking that way at all.It's the last thing on my mind.I'm just loving all of this.Why does it have to mean anything about what I might do sometime in the future?" --- [Courtney continues:] "I just want you to have a stake in this.I mean, what's in it for you otherwise?What do you get out of putting your own life on hold?We could be dead tomorrow. ..." --- pages 119-120

Another Major Success from Shawn Stewart Ruff
`I've lived in a sort of fugue state for years now - my mornings beginning during most people's supper, my evenings ending at the start of canine morning rush hour, when the sidewalks glisten with the new day's fresh piss.I'm more likely to recognize the dog than I am the person holding the leash.'So begins the latest novel TOSS WHIRL PASS by Shawn Stewart Ruff whose rise to literary importance since the publication of his first novel FINLATER has been swift and sure.Ruff is a national treasure, a gifted writer who is unafraid to tackle difficult topics because his use of the English language is as polished as anyone writing today.He can comfortably move from eloquent poetic prose (and poetry, this time) to raw, sensuous, erotic descriptive tones in a manner that does not draw attention to his talent but instead propels his story along.And what a storyteller he is!

Ruff moves so easily from the present to the past by a seamless use of flashbacks that it is sometimes difficult to know where we as readers are in the story.It would seem that TOSS WHIRL PASS is actually one day in the life of our narrator, Yale Battle, an Ivy-educated HIV+ poet/artist whose life and very being are still quivering from that terrifying moment we all refer to as 9/11.No particular time frames are mentioned but it FEELS as though that could have happened approximately two weeks before the opening of Yale's story.But then perhaps it is the author's intention in this paean to those countless men lost to the plague of AIDS to draw a parallel: despite the insidious onset of that disease with all of the physical signs Ruff so astutely describes in the course of this book, the end of life of the victim has the same momentous impact as that explosion of the twin towers.

Through a series of carefully choreographed episodes (`choreographed' is an appropriate term here as Ruff names each of his chapters after a dance position, explaining the French terms in English in a way that foretells the content of the words to come), Yale tells us a bit about his childhood including his introduction to same sex activity with his friend Hillary who later claims to have been assaulted, to his move into adulthood and progression to Ivy League schools in pursuit of his life as a frustrated writer, finding a lone friend in college, moving to New York and encountering Angel, his Dominican friend who dies of AIDS, and his ultimately meeting the ideal man of his life - one Courtney Baines Arrington, a ballet dancer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and a wannabe choreographer.Throughout the book there are the trials and pleasures of his relationship with the narcissistic Courtney and the discovery that Courtney is HIV+ while they work together to make a dance company for Courtney and encourage the development of Yale's writing gifts.The story begins with Yale seeking meds for their dying cat Zsa Zsa Gabor: when the pharmacy will not supply, Yale relies on his own supplier, the very young Solstice, who also happens to be bedding Yale's stuffy British neighbor's wife, and it is at this point that we realize that Yale has long been a drug addict.Since Courtney's death he has been increasing casual about his life (the descriptions of his physical encounters are of the quality of Henry Miller, Genet, Gide et al) and eventually (later on in the day that the story begins) he gets arrested in the park for drugs and public sex with a Jamaican man who is likely the only real person Yale knows. Yes, this is a lot of story, but it is related with such aplomb and brilliant dialogue and intelligence that the reader forgets this happens to be a day in the life of Yale Battle.At the end of the book Yale confronts his own anguish with an extended poem about his eternal love, then resolves the loose ends of his story that began on page one. The final chapter burns itself into the memory of all who have lost loved ones.

In addition to the beauty of this writing the book design is also a work of art designed by Don Joseph as an irregularly shaped volume with excellent font and with the tenderness of printing the extended poem toward the back on black and gray pages.This is the second truly brilliant work by Shawn Stewart Ruff and with it he places himself solidly in the ranks of our finest African American writers - NO, simply one of our finest American writers!Grady Harp, October 10 ... Read more

Product Description
This text provides a detailed overview of the Canadian physical activity sciences - covering the subfields of both research and professional practice areas. Featuring contributions from Canadian scientists and professional leaders in 23 subfields of research and professions, this text aims to stimulate interest among Canadian undergraduates in physical education, the outdoors, leisure studies, fitness, coaching, health education, and exercise and sport sciences. In keeping with its introductory approach, "Physical Activity Sciences" concentrates on professional preparation - for both the subfields of research and the areas of professional practice. Contributors detail their areas of expertise according to core subject matter, methods of study, professional organizations and publications. The text also includes special sections on undergraduate preparation, career opportunities, and recent advances in each field, as well as special elements - definitions important quotes, lists, recent research findings, and so on - set off from the main text for greater emphasis and easier reading.Although "Physical Activity Sciences" is designed as an introductory text for Canadian programmes, it should also be a useful reference for anyone seeking an in-depth understanding of the physical activity sciences and professions. ... Read more

Product Description
Papers from a colloquim held in Montpellier, France, May 22-26, 1995 in honor of Pierre Molino's 60th birthday. DLC: Foliations (Mathematics) - Congresses. ... Read more