Small Crimes by Tom Carey

Small Crimes is a heartbreaking and beautiful valentine between historical moments. Mexico’s early twentieth century art world, its Hollywood moment, is sweetly subverted in Tom Carey’s twitching hands. Reading it I’m grateful for his insouciant homoeroticsm and popping dialogue because they make this novel more memory than simulacrum. Meaning it really feels true.

—Eileen Myles, author of The Importance of Being Iceland

Tom Carey’s Small Crimes is both a passionate novel of hapless love, depicting the way the lonely celebrity of genius neglected in its lifetime is granted and sustained, and an astute critical exegesis on prison art, for can it be seriously doubted that all true art puts the true artist in a walled garden all but smothered in weeds, ordering him to create a beautiful environment, or that love is from beginning to end a maximum insecurity prison? No. The crimes are not so small after all.

—James McCourt, author of Now Voyagers and Queer Street

“… Carey brings history to life with an utterly original poetic voice. His novel teems with complicated life as it takes on issues of faith, social inequity, and sexuality, and with empathy, wit and a deeply felt humanity.”

—Will Scheffer, Writer/Creator of Big Love

Small Crimes, Tom Carey’s first novel, channels triumphantly, and with deep empathy, the ghost of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, an important and singular Mexican painter who dared to live openly as a homosexual at a time in Latin America when homosexuals were routinely scorned by society and persecuted by repressive governments. But Carey’s debut novel is also a fascinating and complex recreation of Mexican history, culture, and mores in the first half of the 20th century. I was riveted by Small Crimes, and I suspect you will be too.

—Jaime Manrique, author of Our Lives Are the Rivers

Tom Carey was born in Los Angeles. His father, Harry Carey, Jr., and his grandfathers, Harry Carey and Paul Fix, appear in some of the most iconic American films (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Red River, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Bad Seed, Giant). Tom studied acting with Jack Garfein and Stella Adler, and moved to NYC in 1977. He appears in several feature films and TV shows, among them Plaza Suite, The Day of the Locust, and The Blue Knight. In the 1970s and 80s he fronted for the punk rock band, “The Beeks,” and was literary assistant to poets James Schuyler and John Ashbery. He earned a degree in Spanish at Columbia University. In 1988 he became a Franciscan brother of the society of St. Francis, an Anglican religious order. He served for thirteen years at St. Elizabeth’s Friary in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 2003. While living in Brooklyn, he ran a theater program for inner city kids for six years, and taught poetry in New York City’s public schools for a decade. He also worked with youth and young adults at Episcopal parishes in Richmond Hill and Astoria, Queens. His book of poems Desire (Painted Leaf Press 1997) was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He currently lives at a Franciscan Friary in Los Angeles, California, where he is the vicar an Episcopal Church near downtown L.A .

Book Information:

· Paperback: 316 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-064-4

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