Ransack

Michael Henson

This novel of street life in Cincinnati was first published in 1980, translated into Russian in 1985, and reprinted here in 1987.  Its author, borrowing from his years in the Appalachian and African-American neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine, describes life on a wrecking crew and the battles that men at the edge of reality fight with society, each other, and their own minds.

“Henson has produced a first novel almost perfect of its kind, a hard-earned lyric set in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, where the wrecking ball regularly creates gaps in the cityscape and where jackleg crews begin their more primitive demolition by clearing the winos out.”—Leon Driskell, Louisville Courier-Journal

“There’s a tight-lipped discipline in Ransack . . . without it, the book would just explode.”—Richard Hague

And he thought, “there’s things I’ve got yet to learn.  But I’ve seen some things I’m not gonna forget.”  And in those days after, he never thought so much on chances he had lost or on his fouled nerves or on the rubble that had nearly buried him but on what he had to do.
             —from Ransack

5½ x 8½ inches • 92 pages • ISBN 0-931122-44-9 • $5.95