Publisher's Synopsis
Former San Francisco Literary Laureate Peter Plate who taught himself to write fiction during eight years squatting in abandoned buildings, delivers a fast-paced dystopian and speculative novel - the latest in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out-of-control gentrification in the Bay Area. California is on fire. Everyone has the virus. Sinister patrols of SWAT teams seem to materialize out of thin air, and if you're not careful, you ll end up exiled down in Bakersfield. In the middle of it all, the fourteen-year-old narrator in Night of the Short Eyes must take care of his mess of a family - Dad is in jail for stealing guns with his partner, Ronnie, and Mom is shacking up with the social worker assigned to the family's case - and he only has one thing to his advantage: he speaks perfect English. Refugees from Russia stream into San Francisco as our narrator approaches his next birthday. His younger brother (nicknamed Putin, 'on account of his broken English and heavy a
