Ahadada Books is pleased to present Sweet Potatoes by Lou Rowan. Sweet Potatoes is Ahadada Books' latest release and is available via Small Press Distribution and through our website. Click here to order.

A native of Southern California, Lou Rowan began his writing career in New York City, where he earned his living as teacher and as an institutional investor. He lives and writes in Seattle. His current projects include a novel about the losing of the West, a sequel to My Last Days, stories, and his editorial dutiesat Golden Handcuffs Review. Click here to visit Lou Rowan's website.

Writes Patrizia Hayashi:

With incisive wit and a remarkable eye for the human condition, Lou Rowan weaves together a collection of short stories that will arouse laughter, nostalgia, and an occasional dose of pity. In Sweet Potatoes, the author lays his characters bare, digging into their psyches, presenting their foibles, and in doing so, holding up a mirror that dares the reader to recognize himself.

Please, click here to read an excerpt.

Writes A.J. Glusman: "Lou Rowan . . . is retired, in love and charged. He was raised by horse breeders and went to Harvard and thus possesses an outward polish. But he talks like a radical, his speech incongruous with his buttoned-down appearance. Golden Handcuffs Review, the local literary magazine that Rowan founded and edits, is much like the man himself: appealing and presentable on the outside, a bit wild and experimental at the core. 

What Others Say About Sweet Potatoes

Lou Rowan's exuberant and richly varied book presents a series of dramatic monologues whose personal and imaginary components are fused in the blaze of the author's enthusiasm. The feeling that he is doing exactly what he wants to do produces consistently lively results, no matter how downbeat the struggles described - with parents, lovers, wives good and bad, business problems, and of course the inescapable self. In the final story, a counterpoint of these voices raises the narration to a level of intensity both harrowing and irresistible...
        -Harry Mathews, author, My Life in CIA

The stories in Lou Rowan's collection "Sweet Potatoes" are brilliantly rendered in a mesh of grim and exuberantly funny shifts of highly original tale-telling. The variety of characters are utterly real and fascinatingly complex. Their daily actions and experiences offer a mesmerizing picture of much in society that is false and outrageous and yet all too forgiveably human. Rowan tunes up his one of a kind narrative voice with resonances of Rabelais, Voltaire, and Mickey Spillane.
        -Rochelle Owens, author, Luca: A Discourse on Life and Death, and Futz

These very short stories are a blend of maybe memoir, crazed case history, and raunchy comic fiction spun by a deadpan narrator with a gift for dazzling transitions.
        -David Antin, author, i never knew what time it was, and what it means to be avant-garde