The life of Stephan Sure, born John Gregory Suhor, began serenely and ended violently in New Orleans. He was both participant and voyeur in the city's middle class, upper class, and gay cultures, yet never found a true home in any of them, nor during his years in Florida, the Midwest, or his sporadic hitchhikes to nowhere. Throughout, Sure kept with him three notebooks comprising The Book of Rude: short lines ranging from insults and puns to social commentaries and cries for help. Born from these rude witticisms is this collection of poetry and short stories that in total represent the far-ranging experiences of this insightful and complicated man. His father, Charles Suhor, gathered his writings after Sure's death for this unique volume.

Sure had a terrific ear for dialogue, as well as a command of narrative mechanics and dramatic technique. Equally impressive is the variety of style and subject matter, which ranges from portraits of drunks and eccentrics to tales of sexual violence, to evocations of childhood, to imaginative fables. … And, refreshingly, Sure appears to have acquired many of his narrative sensibilities from the postwar fiction of many decades past—think Shirley Jackson and John Kennedy Toole. His work is free of the forced hipness which defines many of his contemporaries.

—American Book Review

About the Author/Editor

Stephan Sure (Author)
STEPHAN SURE, born John Gregory Suhor, was a writer and poet living in New Orleans before his death.

Charles Suhor (Editor)
A native of New Orleans, CHARLES SUHOR was a high school English teacher and supervisor in the public schools of the Big Easy. Subsequently, he moved to Urbana, Illinois, where he was Deputy Executive Director of the National Council of Teachers of English, working extensively as an anti-censorship activist. He had a parallel career as a writer and jazz musician, publishing numerous articles and poems and playing drums with Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Buddy Prima, and others. Among his books are the Scholastic Composition Series, Teaching Values in the Literature Classroom: A Debate in Print, Dimensions of Thinking, The Book of Rude and Other Outrages, and the award-winning Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970. He retired in 1997 to Montgomery, Alabama, where he is a freelance writer, speaker, and percussionist and a member of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

The Book of Rude and Other Outrages

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The Book of Rude and Other Outrages

About the Author/Editor

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