Lovesong for the Giant Contessa

the long version

William Herbert Bell, Jr., the novel's narrator, grew up in a town too small - heat struck, sun drenched on the Gulf of Mexico. This is the story of one summer in the early 1960s when everything was as real and as simple as the sound of the cicadas in the treetops or a boyhood friendship - yet as utterly fantastic and as complicated as a first adolescent love or the realization that parents are fallible. During travels with his compadre Chet, Will meets an assortment of characters, good and bad, who alter the substance of his life. He discovers what it is to know love and its companion heartbreak, to see death firsthand, and to understand that this business of living can be a difficult venture. In Lovesong for the Giant Contessa, Steven Culbert transports the reader to the place where the South Plains of Texas meet the gun-barrel blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a place of two-bit barbershops devoid of customers, lonely stretches of highway, ramshackle houses, and abandoned construction sites. His narrator sees the world through a diffracted lens - through which we are privy to a disturbing and desolate reality.