Welcome to Oakland - Softcover

"Fuse the brains of Henry Miller and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, place within the skull of a contemporary American novelist, and set this person to work. The result would be Eric Miles Williamson's Welcome to Oakland. Oakland, Williamson's Oakland, anyway, is sordid and awful, but also honorable and real. Similarly, the characters in his huge cast are both splendidly oversized and entirely human and sympathetic. A roller coaster of a book that leaves you standing on life's solid ground."
--Jake Fuchs

"There's books you can't put down, sure, but every great once in a while there's a book like this, a book that grabs you by the face and makes you stare deeper into it than you really want, so that you never forget. Get ready to be intimidated, insulted, and amazed, sometimes all in the same sentence."
--Stephen Graham Jones

"When I hear politicians talk about how much they love 'blue collar America' I always wonder if they've read Eric Miles Williamson. In Welcome to Oakland Williamson gives us his own hard-earned, unforgettable riff on "blue collar" America, one that sounds like early Henry Miller or war-ravaged Celine--not a sound bite from the RNC. He uses profanity the way Max Roach used the high hat. He writes about garbage the way Wallace Stegner wrote about trees and offers observations on marriage that very few senators would appreciate. It's a world whose humor and rough beauty Sarah Palin seems to have missed, but thanks to Williamson, we've got a front row seat."
--Whitney Terrell

Against the backdrop of a literature that seems to have run out of ideas, Eric Miles Williamson has given us a truly new thing, Oakland: utterly reckless and free-wheeling, Beat and beaten-down, musical and nasty, rude and muscular, drunken and exalted all at once. From his stunning novel, East Bay Grease, about his childhood among Hells Angels, to Two-Up, about the dangerous life of construction work, to Oakland, Jack London, and Me, his take-no-prisoners apologia pro vita sua, and now Welcome to Oakland, Williamson has been seizing the low ground and etching his name on it with a broken piece of rebar: a quadrant of American turf along the San Francisco Bay whose beating heart is a place called Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge in Oakland. Welcome to Oakland is like nothing else in American writing at the moment: maybe ever. It is Jack London in a clown's outfit, mud-flat comedy among the garbage heaps and the refineries, rage against the machine unless it is a motorcycle, fury against the well-off and the ex-wives, the whole Bukowskian effluvium held together by music, the great blaring trumpet of living itself.
--Mark Shechner, author of Up Society's Ass, Copper