No Stopping Train

Description

No Stopping Train is the magnum opus and final novel of the late writer Les Plesko, a powerful, swirling novel of memory and violence set during the Hungarian Revolution. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt following World War II that spread quickly across the destabilizing country. A new government pledged to re-establish free elections until a large Soviet force invaded, killing more than 2500 Hungarians and forcing 200,000 Hungarians to flee the country. Mass arrests and denunciations continued for months until a new Soviet-installed government suppressed all opposition. Public discussion of this revolution was suppressed in Hungary for more than thirty years. Although the revolution failed, it served as a source of great inspiration to many Hungarians, and here Les Plesko taps into his country's history as the dramatic backdrop to his most accomplished and powerful novel. Sandor and Margit are young lovers suffering with their nation through the degradations of war, hunger, and political oppression in Budapest. Into their lives comes the mercurial Erzsebet -- ravaged, war-torn, alluring. Their eventual love triangle upends an already tenuous existence and threatens what little safety they have found in a nation on the brink of revolution. When Sandor's activities as an underground publisher are exposed in a vicious act of betrayal, the lives of each of our characters will never be the same. No Stopping Train is a stylistic tour de force and the final work of Les Plesko.

Les Plesko (1954-2013) is the author of the critically-acclaimed debut novel The Last Bongo Sunset, which was translated into Dutch and German. His other novels include Who I Was and Slow Lie Detector and his stories have appeared in Zyzzyva, Pear Noir!, Columbia Review and The Newer York. He was the recipient of the UCLA Extension Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing where he taught for close to twenty years. Please visit pleskoism.wordpress.com to view the memories posted by friends and students as well as speeches from his memorial gathering at Beyond Baroque.

"...an outpouring of admiration for his courage on the page. Refusing to edit his fiction for marketability...a masterwork in language and imagery...Bearing the weight of his literary career, Plesko's long-awaited novel is a powerful meditation on his country's history and the expansiveness of humanity...serious readers of literary fiction will rejoice."." --Library Journal, Starred Review "In his works the guy never got the girl, the condition was always terminal, the rain always a portent of flood. He believed the small moments of grace we gave each other, human to human, was all there was, all there would ever be." --Samantha Dunn "In his presence, I saw how deeply I feel entitled to happiness. Not expecting life to deliver happiness, but believing it can deliver meaning, Les showed us all his working method. Year after year, day in, day out. For us, he was and is a writers' writer. Uncompromising. Unbought. Free." --Mary Rakow "As much as he gave to others he gave to the page. His page, your page. His books shimmer and shine. Terse and clean and bright and trued. Brace us all, how such a bright heart could fall like that." --Julianne Cohen "Les Plesko wrote as he lived -- sparely, poetically, without flinching. A wry guru to a breed of Los Angeles writers who'd never have found their voices without him. He conjured more deeply, more intuitively and brilliantly than most of us will dare." --David Francis Praise for The Last Bongo Sunset "Les Plesko provides a stark description of a man resisting degradation even as he is driven farther into it. While the others invent and then reinvent their pasts, College relives the tumult of his, protecting his memories and preserving his illusions. The Last Bongo Sunset occasionally reads like a historical document. (Mr. Plesko, who was born in Hungary, studied at U.C.L.A. and lives in Venice, Calif.) But while his novel recalls an earlier time, it also suggests a wider truth. When Maria asks, "Why can't we behave like regular people?" the question applies to many, even if the context doesn't." --New York Times Book Review "In this disturbing, autobiographical first novel, College, the otherwise unnamed narrator, leaves his middle-class life in Boston, looking for adventure and finding it with Gary and Cassandra. They welcome College to their life of petty thievery and selling sex to support their heroin habit in 1970s Venice Beach, California. Although the novel is graphic in its descriptions of the life of drug addicts, Plesko never resorts to sensationalism or hyperbole. As the reader begins to understand College's past and how the loss of his parents in the Hungarian revolution in 1956 affected him, the book takes on a deeper meaning. Plesko's writing style is spare and controlled, echoing the constrained and sad lives these characters live." --Library Journal "Budapest-born Plesko conjures a nightmare of the hippie 1970s, when the youthful quest for experience blared from every radio... Intercutting College's perspectives on his present predicament with his memories of his shattered family and the Hungarian Revolution it fled, Plesko gives further grit and hallucinogenic power to the novel. This is rough stuff." --Booklist