Johnny Payne

Bedfellows: ($15, 116pp, 6X9″: Softcover: ISBN: 978-1-68114-376-7; $30: Hardcover: ISBN-13: 978-1-68114-377-4; $2.99: EBook: ISBN: 978-1-68114-378-1; LCCN: 2017954087; Romance—Action & Adventure; Release: January 1, 2018; Purchase on Amazon or Barnes & Noble): What does a South Florida philosophy professor turned car salesman do when he can’t fall out of love with a passionate, smart, witty, sexy redneck gal who just can’t stay faithful? What do you do when the yearning melancholy animal overtakes the man of reason? Jackson and Annette get to the heart of the matter when she has to travel up to the Alabama panhandle to pay a last visit to her beloved, dying, wickedly rambunctious grandmother Estelle. Seeing Annette attached to a likely man, her kin go in cahoots to see if they can engineer a wedding between tempestuous Annette and her laid-back but anxious suitor. Along the way there is a funeral to be held, fishing and hunting to be done, liquor to be drunk and canasta to be played. Jackson is a stranger in a strange but friendly land. Can the family tame Annette’s wild and stubborn ways enough to make her see that Jackson might be the man of her dreams?

“From the down-home Alabama panhandle to the tantric temptations of the Avalon Hotel on South Beach, this scathingly funny novel assembles a cast of wonderfully strange bedfellows indeed. Payne’s novel intermingles philosophy and wicked humor as his deadpan and love-besotted lead character Jackson attempts to find touchstones of his erotic daydreams, which sometimes turn into phenomenological nightmares. This is a delicious odyssey through a land of friendship, kinfolk, and an unquenchable desire for a woman Jackson just can’t get off his mind.” —J. Bradley Minnick, Host Arts & Letters Radio, NPR

Johnny Payne’s books include the poetry collections Heaven of Ashes and Vassal and the novels Kentuckiana, Second Chance, and La Muerte de Papi. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles. He and his collaborator Kimo Oades, who together created the VR game Odyssey, are currently at work on a novel set in Imperial China, The Eunuch’s Song, which will partly take place in virtual reality.