Bøger udgivet af Alma-Gator

What happens when AI hits the porn industry? Dan Landes is about to find out in INAUTHENTICITY, a tale of murder among the upper echelon of porn producers who are fighting to control the new world of AI porn. When a top porn producer is found dead of a heart attack in Panama, ex-detective Dan Landes suspects foul play. But who would benefit? It turns out that everyone would. Everyone has an axe to grind, including the FBI. Expat Dan Landes travels from Panama to Madrid to unmask who is really who in the new world of AI porn. Robert Rahula, the author of the Treasure of the Gran Ventura and Exigent Circumstances delivers another intriguing Dan Landes Mystery, centered around the exploits of ex-detective from Los Angeles, Dan Landes, his expat friend Ricardo Mendes, and the two police chiefs from Panama, José Fernando and Jorge Manuel.

What is the connection between bitcoin and the collapse of the Bronze Age in 1177 BC? Between the Temple of Moriah in ancient Jerusalem and the central banks of today? Between the Knights of Templar and the end of civilization? Follow ex-detective Dan Landes as he tries to unravel the riddle of thirty-three centuries in the Treasure of the Gran Ventura. Dan Landes lives the perfect expat life in Central America. But the innocent sale of some old Spanish coins leads to the death of two foreigner treasure hunters, and catapults Dan Landes to the town of Toledo, Spain, where he tries to outmaneuver modern-day Templar Knights to piece together a centuries-old map to the location of buried gold from the Crusades. In doing so, he stumbles upon a plot to collapse the central banks and plunge the world into a new Dark Ages. Robert Rahula, the author of Exigent Circumstances and Uninvited Guest delivers another intriguing Dan Landes Mystery, centered around the exploits of ex-detective Dan Landes, his expat friend Ricardo Mendes, and the two police chiefs from Panama, José Fernando and Jorge Manuel.

Alma-Gator Press is proud to present a brand new collection of poems by expatriate American poet Robert Rahula. These are "Portilla" poems. Portilla literally means porthole in Spanish, the small window in a ship from which a sailor can stare from his tiny confined cabin out to the vastness of the sea. Portilla is a style of poetry that exploded in popularity in the late seventies in Madrid, Spain, during La Movida Madrileña - that movement of free expression that erupted after the death of Franco, when young men and women were finally free to express their anger at the dictatorship that had confined them for so long, and finally free to explore sexual themes and practices that had been forbidden to them. Robert Rahula was living in Madrid during those years, presenting his poems at poetry readings in bars and coffee shops, crafting his art, and developing his own unique style of Portilla poetry, a style that accepts human alienation as a norm and deals directly with both sexuality and death. For over fifty years, Robert has continued to write and publish. His poetic output during his life has been nothing less than astonishing. The poems in this new collection are not arms-length intellectualisms, but poetic transcriptions of real life, with all its ecstasy, eventual deception, separateness, and pointless decay.

American expat Ricardo lives alone in a quiet town in Panama and dreams of one last romantic fling. But his nightly dreams are haunted by a mysterious brujo, an ancient sorcerer who has not been seen in 15 years. As the dreams increase in sexual intensity, Ricardo begins to question his sanity. Then one day, the brujo appears in person. From Robert Rahula, the acclaimed writer of Panamaniac, comes a surreal story of love, sex and sorcery. Set in the tiny town of Villa Rosario, One Last Fling follows the life of a bisexual expat who discovers that while he has been hunting love, a brujo has been hunting him.

Everyone thinks the old man of Villa Rosario is crazy, but Ricardo visits him every day, bringing him wine so he can listen to the old man’s theories of how gravity bends time and how love bends everything. The old man gets his theories from a magical talking Giant Fly that lives in his eye. The old man might be crazy, but his theories start making sense to Ricardo.  And Ricardo needs something to make sense to him now.  He moved to Panama to escape the US, but now he finds himself adrift in Paradise. From Robert Rahula, the acclaimed writer of Panamaniac, comes a surreal story of one day in the life of expatriate Ricardo, as he bounces from bars to brothels to bathhouses and experiences his entire life in a single day, a day where nothingΓÇòand everythingΓÇòall happen at once, from a magical talking Giant Fly to lectures on gravity and love from the old man of the village.

What if you knew you were going to die and only had one afternoon to give an accounting of your life?  That is the task that has been presented to Ricardo, an old expat living in a tiny dusty town in Panama, a town where he has sought refuge from the world for the past fifteen years. When it dawns on Ricardo that death is near, he feels an ancient urge to provide a reckoning of his life, his past loves, his polyamorous excesses, his philosophy, and his failures. He gives himself one afternoon to complete his accounting before he packs his bags. From Robert Rahula, the acclaimed writer of Panamaniac and Uninvited Guest, comes the simple story of a man trying to comprehend what his life has meant.

When Ricardo moves into a small apartment complex in Panama - an apartment building full of expats and retirees - he thinks he's found the perfect tropical hideaway from all he left behind in the States… until Alison points out how strange some of the residents are. While Ricardo and Alison push their sexual boundaries inside Ricardo's apartment, a furious rage is seething next door. Ricardo's carefully arranged sanctuary is about to be cracked apart by betrayal, murder and madness. From Robert Rahula, the acclaimed author of Exigent Circumstances and Conversations in a Belgian Bar, comes another tale of murder and intrigue in Latin America, where underneath the palm trees and laid-back lifestyle, no one is as they appear to be.

Can sexual obsession ever lead to love? Messieurs tells the interrelated story of three men, each obsessed with sex in their own way. Monsieur, divorced and solitary, drifts through the cities of France, seeking and seducing women but never connecting with them. He repeatedly returns to the gay bathhouses for sanctuary...until he meets Enid. Back in the USA, Paul is writing a book on the S&M culture. But the characters in his book are stronger than he expected, and they start to become more real to him than his own life. In Canada, Ricardo finds comfort in the brothels and begins to fall in love with a 19 year old prostitute named Haley. All three men find that their obsession with sex, while addictive and dangerous, is their only connection to the possibility of love.

In Panamaniac, Ricardo decides to quit his job at a prestigious New York law firm and move to Panama, where he hopes to discover the perfect combination of sex (straight/gay/bi/trans) and time – time to pursue his secret career as a short story writer. But the road to paradise becomes an increasingly strange pilgrimage with each person that Ricardo meets: Kit, the wounded woman-child, and Phillipe, her transsexual guardian angel; Wilson, the 300 pound linguist and ruthless businessman; Eve, the perfect woman who slips through Ricardo’s hands; Miguel, the closeted restaurant owner who hooks Ricardo up with his silent ex-lover Eduardo; Alma the palm reader who sees into Ricardo’s soul; and a parade of other shadowy figures who spend their lives in brothels or bathhouses. Ricardo discovers that paradise is never what it seems. In fact, paradise is a dark and twisted journey to self-discovery. 18 and older only.

A chance encounter in a Belgian bar puts a young man at the same table with an older man. It turns out that the older man personally knows a famous writer that the younger man admires. At the young man's prodding, the older man shares details about the young man's hero. The young man is intrigued and wants to hear more, and so he agrees to meet the next night for dinner. But the next night, the story takes an erotic and sinister tone, revealing dark secrets about all three men, and ultimately leading to a shocking finale.In Conversation in a Belgian Bar, master storyteller Robert Rahula shows us that things are never what they seem, not even the apparent innocent conversation between two strangers.

All the Yage in Reno is the second novel in what the Spanish critic Phillipe Cordova called the “Essential Dan Landes novels” – those four magical realism detective stories that Robert Rahula wrote during his years living in Panama (Bathhouse Stories, All the Yage in Reno, Exigent Circumstances, and Uninvited Guest) – but the fact is, the character of Dan Landes appears much earlier in Robert Rahula’s novels.  He first appears as a minor character in Island of Misfits, and then again in One Last Fling. But it was not until Bathhouse Stories that Dan Landes emerged as a true protagonist and as the embodiment of antagonism between the North American and Latin American cultures.In his essay The Hero’s Journal, Robert Rahula wrote:  “To be a hero is to be conflicted, because the essential conflict of humans is the subduction zone between our rational analytical world and the invisible emotional world of the Fates.  One plate is invariably forced beneath the other until the pressure becomes too much.  When I talk about the inherent faults of the hero, I’m talking about actual faults, not metaphorical ones. ”Yet, it is easy to question Dan Landes as a hero of anything. Forced to resign from his detective job in Los Angeles in disgrace, he seeks refuge in Central America, only to flee back to the states after being unwittingly drawn into a brutal murder in Panama.  He hopes Reno, Nevada, will provide the anonymity he couldn’t find south of the border.  But his journey is not a geographical one, it is a psychological one.  Like Appointment in Samarra, Dan Landes thinks he has chosen Reno to escape his past. But the Fates have different plans.  He has picked the very city where his past is waiting for him.The beauty of Robert Rahula’s writing is that all his novels intertwine with each other, yet each stands firmly on its own as a separate story.  And while each of the “Dan Landes Mysteries” appears to follow classic detective story structure, they are really about questions of the soul.  All the Yage in Reno deals with the question of free will.  And while the themes of personal choice and fate flow through many of Robert Rahula’s novels, it is never more directly addressed than here.If this book is your introduction to Robert Rahula’s writing, then sit back and enjoy a good murder mystery.  But also be prepared to wonder if any of our choices are really free ones.

“When Death – that uninvited and unwelcomed guest – arrives, all plans cease; everyone has to stop and make adjustments; and everyone has to deal with it.” Magali – a young prostitute of Villa Rosario, Panama – has died.  Her ex-lovers, including friends Ricardo and Dan Landes, attend her funeral, each harboring different memories of her.  In fact, everyone harbors different memories of her, because no one really knew who she was.  But her ghost comes back from the grave to prod ex-detective Dan Landes to uncover the truth about her death.  It’s a journey that leads him into a labyrinth of sorcery, Colombian drug lords, FBI surveillance, and murder.  But uncovering the truth about Magali’s death may be easier than uncovering the truth about her life.  In the “Dan Landes Mysteries”, author Robert Rahula follows the lives of expatriates living in a small town in Panama, and uses them as a looking-glass into a world of existential dilemmas faced all of those who try and maintain their humanity in a world of colliding cultures.

Over the past three decades, Robert Rahula has published more than 30 books of prose and poetry in Spain and in the United States. While he is just beginning to be discovered in the United States, he is revered in Spain as the founder of the "portilla" style of popular Spanish poetry: non-metered introspective verse that deals with love, loss, sexuality, separateness, and growing older. Robert was born in Spain to an American father and Spanish mother, but grew up in Virginia on the farm of his paternal grandparents. He returned to Menorca, Spain, in the 1960s to pursue his writing career. These days he travels in Europe, Central and South America for several months a year, giving readings and lectures, and spends the rest of his time writing, dividing his time between Spain and the United States. Alma-Gator Press is proud to bring together 23 of Robert's best known Spanish portilla poems in one volume.

In an unnamed and timeless Latin American country, the lives of six men and three police officers intertwine after a brutal murder in a gay bathhouse. Dan Landes, an expatriate retired Los Angeles cop, is recruited to hunt for a serial killer who preys on lonely men in the dark steam rooms. When it looks like the killer might get away with another murder, Dan is forced to use his friend Ricardo as bait. Explicit content. 18 and older please.From Robert Rahula, the acclaimed author of Messieurs and Conversations in a Belgium Bar, comes a graphic and "sexistential" story of sexual murder in Latin America. But behind the explicit scenes of anonymous gay sex lies a deeper story. Robert Rahula navigates this dark take on the classic murder mystery to examine the irreconcilable conflict between the North American justice system and the "old ways" of a small Latino town. Cultural assumptions of evidence, due process, sexual tolerance, fairness, and justice collide when police from different countries are forced to work together.

This collection consists of expatriate poems selected from five of Robert Rahula’s best known books of poetry written during his years living in Europe, Mexico, and Central America.  The word expatriate derives from the French word expatrier (and originally from the Latin expatriatus) meaning to banish, and evokes a feeling of being forced out of one’s homeland… assuming one ever felt at home to start with. These are the poems of the wanderer, the outcast, the immigrant, the pilgrim, the disenfranchised, the drifter, the wayfarer, and the nomad. Written in the “portilla” style of popular Spanish poetry, these existential poems deal with bisexuality, separateness, politics, the expatriate life, aging and death. They are unapologetically polyamorous and realpolitik, occasionally dark, but never despairing.  They are emblematic of the expatriate experience everywhere.