Available from publisher now,
in wide
release May
1, 2025
The Heart is Meat
AN 80'S MEMOIR
In 1982, new to the city, I took a job in NYC’s meatpacking district, back then a wild confluence of workers in white coats, gay men hitting the Mineshaft, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French resistance and Holocaust survivors. I was also half of a couple, fresh from the Midwest. Seduced by the excitement of the East Village, we lived with an intensity that could only end in ruin. The Heart is Meat is a re-creation of a mythic time and place in NYC that can never exist again, an evocation of a pre-networked American Romanticism.
Based on his mother's recollections of the night she had to run from her home in the hills to search for help for her own dying mother, Michael Backus' Coney on the Moon brings the Kentucky countryside of the mid twentieth century to vivid, startling life. Seen through the eyes of a strong but terrified young girl, it is a land full of local eccentrics, native legends, and half believers in ghosts. This heartbreaking and gorgeous story is a meditation on family, mortality, and the persistence of story.
About Michael Backus
Michael Backus’ writing, fiction and non-fiction, has appeared in One Story, Exquisite Corpse, Channel magazine, Digging Through the Fat, Okey Panky, Cleaver, Oyster River Pages, Prime Number magazine, Every Writer’s Resource, Hanging Loose, The Writer, and The Sycamore Review, among others. He teaches creative writing for Gotham Writers Workshop and Zoetrope Magazine and lives in Albuquerque, NM.
