Here at Penknife Press we feature works by upcoming authors. Works that may be a bit off the beaten path. But rest assured that they will all engage your attention, tweak your imagination, raise your awareness or tickle your fancy.
Take a look around, 
read some of the free excerpts and hopefully you will find something that you want to take home forever.
Satan’s Anvil and other Stories – OBI
Characterized by one editorial assistant as “daring work indeed,” this is a no-holds-barred look at one small portion of black American life. OBI wrote this piece mostly in dialogue. It is set in present day Chicago. The main character, Piano Man, tells his part of the story from the second person viewpoint. The foil character, Juke, tells his story from the first person viewpoint. The mix of viewpoints prompted Obi to call the technique Literary Cubism. Piano Man and Juke are both in their sixties. The story opens with them playing chess at Juke’s house and talking about old times. They were members of the same jazz quartet. Juke confronts Piano Man with photographs of Piano Man making out with a white woman. Piano Man can’t remember when they were taken. When asked where the pictures came from, Juke says they were found under the bed of another now deceased friend of their’s named Dempsey. Juke then admits for the first time in their friendship that Dempsey was his half-brother. He explains that his father had had an affair years ago, and that Dempsey was the result. Dempsey was put up for adoption, and when his adoptive parents died, he looked for and found his birth family. Piano Man was...
read moreShafi Doldi – Paris Smith
From the author of Subterranean Tales and Shadow Worlds comes an edgy, urban thriller steeped in Western debauchery and subterfuge. Paris Smith has created a work that examines the social decay and the evolution of capitalist amorality through the mind and soul of Shafi Doldi – a man determined to confiscate luxury with brutal diligence. Shafi Doldi originates in rural Islamic Ethiopia, travels to cosmopolitan Eastern Europe, and finally, into both Chicago’s upper chelons and its inner-city hells. This new novel details the corruption of Shafi Doldi’s existence as he succumbs to the vice of materialism. Read a...
read moreVirginia Creeper – Laura Wright
She escaped the Virginia Creeper, but her freedom comes with a price. When she recuperates from the tortures of the cabin, she learns she isn’t alone. Something followed her. Something will not let her forget or flee the past. Cabin Fever, he called it. It was a game, a charade, something to entertain the virtual masses at a fatal price to participants. She believed the Creeper worked alone. The truth is far more disturbing. Even after she is home and surrounded by loved ones, the horrors don’t stop. The Creeper was a puppet, a mere pawn in the ultimate game of human cruelty. It is up to her to locate the mastermind before it’s too late. Read a...
read moreBillion Dollar Winner – A.P. Jones
Meet Valencia (Val) Banks Freeman. Chicagoan, WestSider, Malcolm X College graduate, Owner-Publisher of BlackSide Press, the largest community newspaper in the city, Community Activist and winner of one billion dollars from Lotto-50 – the first entire All-Fifty-States lottery. What? An activist winning the lottery? How can that be? True Activists don’t buy lottery tickets. They protest against them. If you ever listened to black talk radio or seen the activists on television, then you know that the activists always have all the answers. But seldom do they ever have the money to fix the problems. Billion Dollar Winner tells the story of what happens when one of the main individuals who protested the loudest against the Lotto-50 lottery game turns out to win the very lottery she so actively disparaged. Will Val remain true to her activist nature? Or will the love of money, which is at the root of all evil, change her and make her the hypocrite everyone calls her when they find out she won the money? And just how did someone who never bought a lottery ticket in her entire life come to possess one in the first place? Read a...
read moreThe Reward of the Fool – OBI
The Reward of the Fool is the sequel to The Last and Final King. In it, the main character, now called Jay Sam Guy, continues his revolutionary ways. Only now, the targets are bigger. This could be the best book Obi has written. Read a...
read moreThe Warrior’s Belt – Warren W. Holmes
Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a man more than the sum of his parts, through the course of his life became variously a precocious scholar, planter, sea captain, trapper, explorer, tribal chieftain, and one of the wealthiest men in 18th Century Midwestern United States. Like all of us, he was shaped by the peculiar circumstances of his surroundings. But in order to survive the perils of his environment he constantly reinvented himself to fit his times. The central fact of DuSable’s existence is that he has largely been lost to history by becoming the victim of myth. It has long been debated whether he was the founder of Chicago. Such debate is often garbled in the babble of semantics. The truth is that in the place he had the vision to predict was strategically situated to be the economic center of North America, there is scarcely a monument to mark his ever passing this way. This, too, is due to the circumstance of his being. Those in the process of stealing the land from its indigenous peoples and alternately, time and again, from each other were not willing to credit a Black man from Haiti with opening the bounty of the Midwest to prosperity that gained great currency after his death. It does not go unnoticed that subtle...
read moreSincere – Barry Ellis
A gritty, urban thug novel about a day in the life in the streets of Chicago.
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