Ninety-Nine Bottles

Joe Peterson is ...one of the Windy City's best-kept secrets. - Kirkus Reviews For me, Joe Peterson's voice is a fresh pair of feet on the very dusty road of contemporary American literature. - Dan Fante, bestselling author of Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving Writer and drinker Jack London said of saloons that 'there, life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness...Terrible they might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful.' In prose as sharp as shards of a shattered beer glass and tart as the lime with your shot of tequila, Joseph G. Peterson's Ninety-Nine Bottles depicts the dynamics of a drinker's and a bar's terrible greatness. Open this book, as you might walk beneath an Old Style sign into any random Chicago corner tavern, to find a sense of peace and solace and connection to others, as well as the loneliness and despair that can come when the Bar, and the contents of its countless bottles, becomes your whole world. A book full of insight, humor, heartbreak, and humanity. - Bill Savage, Northwestern University This is an outstanding work that crosses the boundary between poetry and prose in ways reminiscent of Michael Ondaajte's The English Patient. The ninety-nine vignettes give a coherent picture of a life filled with tragedy and spurned opportunity, yet the book never descends into pathos; what we find instead is a brilliant meditation by a central character who has made many of the mistakes we all dread. Virtually the whole story is set in a bar, with the hero at varying stages of drunkenness, but none of this affects his ability to give us insights into our existence, all rendered in Peterson's masterful style. - Stephen Grant, author of Spanish Light In Ninety-Nine Bottles, Joseph Peterson does for booze what Thomas De Quincey did for opium. This is a guide book and a devotional. Love bars with a whaler's harpoon hanging from the wall? Love day drinking? Still remember the eulogy you said for your dead dad, your dead brother, your dead daughter? What about the lover you met at a bowling alley and headed to Alaska with? This is your dream book, your spiritual guide to living the hard life with style. Written in vignettes as sharp as an alcoholic tongue. Joseph Peterson shows us decay and he shows us how to rehabilitate our spirits. He is one of those rare American writers who believes in God, not as a deity, but as a spiritual task worth seeking and illuminating through prose. I love to hear him preach. I love to hear his drunken songs. I love that well into his writing career, he has written his best and most important book. - Dave Newman, author of Sammy Drinks Canned Beer