Novels
- Pride of the Bimbos (1975)
- Union Dues (1977)
- Los Gusanos (1991)
- A Moment in the Sun (2011)
- Yellow Earth (2020)
Collections
- The Anarchists Convention (1979)
- Dillinger in Hollywood (2004)
- The Anarchist’s Convention and Other Stories (2005)
Non fiction
- Thinking in Pictures (1990)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
John Sayles Books Overview
Pride of the Bimbos
The Pride of the Bimbos is John Sayles’s outrageous, poignant and hilarious first novel, about a circus sideshow softball team The Brooklyn Bimbos who play in drag at scraggly small towns across the South. The heart of the team and the novel is a midget and former private eye named Pogo Burns, who is pursued by Dred, an evil super pimp whom Pogo had earlier shot in order to rescue a woman he loved. The Pride of the Bimbos is about Pogo’s rise, fall and eventual immortality, a man who refuses to admit he’s a freak.
Union Dues
The setting is Boston, Fall 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It’s a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions. His father Hunter, who has been involved in a brave and dangerous campaign to unseat a corrupt union president in the coal miners union, leaves West Virginia to hunt for his runaway son. To make ends meet, he takes day labor jobs in order to survive while searching for him. Living parallel lives, their destinies ultimately movingly collide in this sprawling classic of radicalism across the generations, in the vein of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Richard Price.
Los Gusanos
Award winning writer John Sayles’s critically acclaimed novel explores fifty years of Cuban American relations. Set in Miami in 1981, Los Gusanos is the vivid and moving account of one extended family’s life in Cuba and the United States. With pathos and understanding, Sayles introduces us to a memorable range of characters young, old, black, and white all of whom are struggling to make a new life in their adopted country while haunted by the memories of Cuba. Taking as its title the derogatory term Castro used to describe those who fled to Miami after he came to power, Los Gusanos is beautifully rendered; a deterministic study of who will be the casualty and who the survivor in a time of political upheaval.
A Moment in the Sun
It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood both, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights from the white racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepc on, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country s new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley s assassin among them this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.
Dillinger in Hollywood
Before John Sayles was an Oscar nominated screenwriter and celebrated independent filmmaker, he was a National Book Award nominated writer of fiction. Now John Sayles has written his first short story collection in twenty five years. The keynote story ‘Dillinger in Hollywood‘ is populated by leftovers from the Golden Age of Hollywood who live in a nursing home catering for ‘below the line’ talent dancers, stunt doubles, horse wranglers, stand ins, studio drivers who now wait for death and dementia, playing cards, breaking hips, busting ribs, and telling tall tales of days gone by. During one hot summer, Casey, a long term resident, confesses that he ‘used to be John Dillinger. In the flesh.’ The supposed John Dillinger, a legendary outlaw who had been popped at the Biograph Theater, was simply a ‘stand in.’ Sayles’s stories, like his movies, are panoramic in scope, weaving together disparate elements, where the past has a powerful claim on the present, where the characters are down on their luck, struggling to make ends meet. Ultimately, John Dillinger in Hollywood showcases Sayles s uncanny ear for language, his skill at crafting character, humor and atmosphere, and shows why he is the winner of the John Steinbeck Award, the O. Henry Award, and others.
The Anarchist’s Convention and Other Stories
Before John Sayles was an Oscar nominated screenwriter, he was a National Book Award nominated writer of fiction. The Anarchists’ Convention is his first short story collection, providing a prism of America through fifteen stories. These everyday people a kid on the road heading west, aging political activists, a lonely woman in Boston go about their business with humor and resilience, dealing more in possibility than fact. In the widely anthologized and O. Henry Award winning ‘I 80 Nebraska,’ Sayles perfectly renders the image of a pill popping trucker who has become a legend of the road.
Thinking in Pictures
What choices creative, practical, and technical make a movie what it is? Here a gifted writer and filmmaker takes us behind the camera and provides a full description of the movie making process. When John Sayles turned from writing fiction to making movies, he did so with little help from Hollywood: Return of the Secaucus Seven, Sayles’s first movie as director and writer, was produced with $60,000 of his own money. Many films later, he still works outside the studio system and guides every phase of his productions. Now Sayles has written an illuminating book about the complex choices that lie at the heart of every movie. Using the making of his film Matewan as an example, he offers chapters on screenwriting, directing, editing, sound, and more. Photographs, sketches, and the complete shooting script illustrate this engaging account of how Sayles’s curiosity about a coal miners’ strike in the town of Matewan, West Virginia, became a screenplay and then a movie.
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