Agora: Fall 2014

JOHN GUZLOWSKI 

In His Own Words:

After I retired I started writing fiction, something I always wanted to do but never had time for. 

I've written two novels. Road of Bones is a novel about two German lovers who are separated during the war.  He's on the Eastern Front fighting the Germans, and she's working in Berlin as an accountant in a department store.  The action in the novel takes place over the course of a single week. Cervena Barva Press will be publishing this novel in spring of 2015.

The other novel is called Suitcase Charlie, and I just received a contract for it from Ravenswood Press, a press specializing in crime and mystery novels.  This novel deals with a series of ritual murders in a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors in Chicago in the 1950s. The murders are meant to look like Blood Libel murders, as if Jews are targeting Christian victims. 


Three pieces of Road of Bones  have been published:

"The German" in Joyce Carol Oates' journal Ontario Review.
"Dinner in Wartime" in the Snake Nation Review
And "Village of Cold Houses" in the WIPS Journal (an online journal that publishes and discusses Works In Progress):

Here's the link for an excerpt from Road of Bones, about 5 pages, that haven't been published anywhere else, and an interview I gave there.

http://www.wipsjournal.com/john-guzlowski-village-of-cold-houses-an-excerpt-from-road-of-bones/

John's writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, The Ontario Review, Atticus Review, Modern Fiction Studies and other journals both here and abroad.  His poems about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his books Lightning and Ashes and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.  His novel Road of Bones about two German lovers separated by WWII is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press.  Writing of Mr. Guzlowski’s poetry, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz said, “He has an astonishing ability for grasping reality.”