The characters in Flying Home live in the real Washington, D.C., worlds away from the heroic statues, the white marble monuments, and the broad, tree-lined avenues. They are ordinary working men and women maids, taxi drivers, janitors, barbers, and handymen. Theirs is a city of neighborhoods and back-porch summer nights, a city where men swap lies in barber shops, toasts are proclaimed on street corners, and fathers struggle to teach their children right from wrong. It's a city beset by change. And, in remembering it, David Nicholson has taken to heart what novelist Harper Lee said of her hometown : I believe there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing. David Nicholson, like his literary ancestors Ralph Ellison, James Alan McPherson, and Bernard Malamud, illuminates the mythic in the everyday lives of Americans whose stories are all too rarely deemed worthy of art. The peach tree in an old woman s yard in urban Washington glows with nearly magical fruit that tempts a young man to a betrayal he knows will rot his soul. A chorus of middle-aged black men in a barber shop hold a symposium on the nature of love. James Brown and Jimi Hendrix walk Nicholson s streets, but so, too, do anonymous heroes such as a black handyman who once pitched to Babe Ruth, a janitor struggling to maintain his dignity despite financial reverses, a disheveled beggar woman whose mere survival strikes us as a miracle. In Flying Home, David Nicholson shines his compassion and wisdom on them all. Eileen Pollack, author of In the Mouth and Breaking and Entering David Nicholson is such a gifted, assured storyteller that I read FLYING HOME in a single sitting, pulled from one beautifully written, wise, and moving story to the next, so enchanted by the lives he explores in the secret city, and by his skill, that I was unaware of the passage of time. This is superbly crafted, memorable writing that will leave readers hungering for more. CHARLES JOHNSON, National Book Award-winning author of MIDDLE PASSAGE David Nicholson, in FLYING HOME, his evocative and potent fiction debut, tells stories so grounded in specifics as to seem folkloric, delivering folklore on pavement. He writes in unhurried and assured prose, with sentences that can, when called for, become flowing, full of eddies and swirls. Dizzy Gillespie once said that it took him a lifetime to learn what not to play, and I believe Nicholson heard him and has also done that very thing. DANIEL WOODRELL, author of WINTER S BONE David Nicholson, and all those people I mentioned to you: You should talk to them. Really, go talk to them. Get a book out about them. Find a way to cultivate a larger audience for them. James Alan McPherson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of ELBOW ROOM In FLYING HOME, David Nicholson, the dauntless founder of BLACK FILM REVUEW, gives us a series of absorbing stories, captured for the reader in a linguistical version of CinemaScope, along with a most playful riff on Ralph Ellison s narrative style. Intimate yet wide-angled, imaginative and probing, Nicholson s collection is, as its last tale reveals, full of the inspiration and longing that come with having seen Hendrix perform live on the grandest of stages when music and society were on the edge of revolution. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University - from Amzon