Joe David Bellamy

If you are interested in purchasing a copy of this book, please send a check for $25 (new hardcover) or $15 (new paperback) to: Bellamy House Publishing, 1145 Lawson Cove Circle, Virginia Beach, VA 23455.

"Joe David Bellamy writes it real. Our values have overslept, and Bellamy is a wake-up call. The award-winning author of Suzi Sinzinnati, a comic novel about growing up sapped in the 60s, turns serious in Atomic Love, a sizzling collection of stories about how we grope and cope in the 90s. It's a dark carnival of consequences, unflinchingly observed.... So who needs another dread indictment of the times? We do, when it is laced with the kind of humanity this writer brings to his tough, careful prose.... In 'Saving the Boat People,' a well-intentioned housewife seeks to assist a refugee family, only to become a refugee herself from her own damaged marriage. In 'The Weeds of North Carolina,' a callow college kid confronts an inconstant girlfriend and a three-hour philosophy exam with but a single question: 'What is life?' Atomic Love is Bellamy's blue-book answer, curt, uncompromising, but compassionate. Never mind geography, he seems to suggest; we are all of us boat people, each one adrift on a separate, painfully inadequate bark, bound for some distant, unimaginable and perhaps unaccommodating shore. Well, says Bellamy, 'keep rowing.' Bellamy is a compelling chronicler of the way we live now."
--Bill Ruehlmann, The Virginian-Pilot

"Joe David Bellamy's Atomic Love is a series of virtuoso performances. Bellamy is cagey and shrewd, bravely engaging the conventions of stories, and one must admire him for taking risks...."
--David Slavitt

"Joe David Bellamy's new collection, Atomic Love, is a series of delicate portraits, almost photographs, that on closer inspection reveal themselves to be like those tricky pictures we approach in museums. Not photographs at all, but the almost painfully accurate depiction of emotional life in the form of a million tiny brush strokes. There is a gentleness to Bellamy's brush that convinces the reader of his characters' wide vulnerability.... Atomic Love is a vivid gallery of intimate portraits, composed with a careful touch and a clear eye."
--Lisa Hartz

"The collection sparkles with precise characterization and tight phrasing. Each story here is finely tuned and perfectly told, an oasis of great writing waiting to be discovered."
--Elizabeth Gunderson