Richard Daub
Richard Daub is a fiercely independent fiction writer who grew up on Long Island, New York, where he pilfered milk crates, loitered in bowling alleys, rumbled in shopping mall parking lots, stocked supermarket frozen foods aisles, played guitar, cruised nightclub parking lots for girls, wrote crappy song lyrics, and longed for the day he’d forever leave “Strong Island”. He is the author of two novels, The Island Country and History of von Schatt (1913-1960).
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The Island Country
Literary Fiction
Long Island, New York, just after World War II, when the country was great for some and not so great for others, home to the Smith Family: Philip, a racist Nassau County detective with a secret; his mentally ill wife, Eunice, speeding around the house looking for her coffee can of prescription pills; their oldest son, Philip Jr., aspiring pastor and budding monster; daughter Joyce, with a serious artistic talent that, in the great mall culture, she doesn't know what to do with; and Oscar, an obese child who wants nothing more than to be a fireman when he grows up. After surviving her own dysfunctional childhood, Joyce marries Roger, a beeraholic Customs Inspector with whom she would have two children: Griff, an enterprising lad fully comfortable on the other side of a line, and Stacy, a girl attuned to a dark frequency few can perceive. Decades go by, marriages fall apart, children long to escape, and Joyce struggles to find happiness in her art and life in the only place she would ever know. |
History of Von Schatt (1913-1960)
Literary Fiction
The man, the monster… This history chronicles the origin of the von Schatt family: from the abandonment of its patriarch, Heinrich, on the steps of an orphanage in prewar Germany; through his apprenticeship on the high seas with a salty drunken smuggler; his flight from the Nazis to Sweden; his kidnapping of a child bride to America; his becoming the most feared Captain in the US military troop transport fleet; his concurrent role as husband and father of two dysfunctional Long Island families; and his lifelong obsession to uncover the secret behind a set of coordinates he'd found written on an old map. ABOUT RICHARD DAUB On a wood paneled wall in his grandmother's Long Island home had been hung a creepy painting of the grandfather he'd never met, a ship captain supposedly so frightening that the author, as a boy, could see fear in the eyes of the adults whenever they spoke of "The Captain", who, by then, had been dead two decades, wild tales of land and sea they probably never imagined the boy would recall later in life as a washed-up journalist turned fiction writer. Do you see any resemblance? |