Crossroads Blues - kindle eBook by Israfel Sivad

Crossroads Blues – A New York love story for the 21st century.
“I never intended to write this book.  I meant to write an entirely different book, but this is what eventually came out.  You see, I was a struggling writer/actor living in Brooklyn at the turn of this century.  I’d moved from Boston with the intention of finding a world that would lead me to write something like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club – an ideology I’d embraced since the movie had been released in 1999.  I had a plot (sort of), I had characters, and I had a vision.  Then, the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001.  The New York I’d moved to was no longer, and with the death of that city came the death of my original novel.  I took the characters I’d invented, and I moved them into a new story.
Crossroads Blues is the result of everything I saw happening in the United States after I first left New York in the spring of 2002.  Back then, I was living in Virginia, working construction and trying to explain to the people around me what I’d learned living through that time period in the self-proclaimed ‘Capital of the World’.  This book was the result of those conversations, those attempts to convey the feelings I couldn’t seem to get anybody else to understand.  We all have our own experiences of that day.  I’m not trying to tell anybody else’s story.  This is simply what the world felt like for me as I wrote this story.
“Originally, I approached literary agents with this project, but given the cultural climate of 2004, when I completed the novel, I was told it was unmarketable.  Eventually, I decided to self-publish this work because too many of my friends had told me it was a story they simply believed other people needed to hear.  I don’t know if you’ll enjoy reading this book (I didn't always enjoy writing it), but I don’t believe art is necessarily meant to be enjoyed.  Sometimes, I feel, just like with life, art is something that can only be experienced.  I invite you to experience Crossroads Blues with me.” – Israfel Sivad