Carlos Dews | Hush | Press Release

Carlos Dews

CARLOS DEWS’S HUSH IS “AN INSTANT CLASSIC” AND “A MASTERPIECE”:  WILD PRAISE FOR A FIRST NOVEL

Negative Capability Press is delighted to announce the publication (15 September 2020) of CARLOS DEWS’S novel, Hush.

Carlos Dews grew up in Nacogdoches County, Texas. He has graduate degrees from the University of Minnesota and the New School University. He lives in Italy where he teaches at John Cabot University. Hush is his first novel.

Set in East Texas during the last century, Hush follows four women who marry into a single family, imagining how they cleave together despite war, poverty, and prejudice, to redirect their lives, finding hope in a place and in a family determined to provide them with only misery and pain.

Hush is a novel that will simultaneously break your heart with all its misery and make you fall in love with its characters.  Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story and A Saint From Texas writes that “Hush is a deeply felt, tightly plotted tale of generations of cruel men and their suffering wives, living in hardscrabble poverty—an instant classic! Stark as the portraits might be, they are always rendered with compassion. Dews has a heart as big as Texas.”

Hush is a fiction written in a style and with a stark simplicity that makes it beloved by poets.  David Keplinger, author of Another City and The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems writes “Dews makes of the spare, understated language of his people a mosaic, a single story composed from all the broken parts. Hush is a masterpiece.” And the renowned Australian poet Susan Bradley Smith “Hush is a book that builds new neighborhoods in your heart. Children never forgetting, autofiction playing Helter Skelter with history, and love like diamond-encrusted mud everywhere you step: watch out or life will turn into a gun that eats you, which is the precise power of Dews’s literary homage to fear, family, and indeed the future. This is a book for every month of the year, including the month that time forgot.”

And Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003) and author of The Rain in Portugal, writes of Hush: “Interweaving several narrative lines, Carlos Dews has fashioned a raw, suspenseful autobiographical narrative. His prose is clear and steady, one sentence after another pulling the reader forward and down deeper into many overlapping raw, eye-opening stories of human survival. Hush has a gripping, mesmerizing power that will bring you in and not let you go.”

Negative Capability Press recognizes that in our current time it is important to publish books that celebrate women who, against all odds, rear men to resist the lessons of toxic masculinity, to see that there is another way to be a man.  Hush does just that.

Hush is available on Amazon.

Sue Walker, Negative Capability Press.