john g ives
"It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something."
"What are we holding on to, Sam?"
"That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for."
All About Me
John G. Ives is the author of three novels, including Pandaemonium Moon, now being published by Historium Press, as well as two non-fiction titles and an upcoming book of poetry. His novel, The Keeper (2013), is set in Provincetown in 1900, about the daring shipwreck rescues of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, with illustrations and cover by his daughter, Justine Ives; it sold nearly 2,000 copies in the Cape Cod area under their own imprint, Bohème Publishing. His first, unpublished, novel, After the End of the World, is a fantastic story of apocalyptic disaster and family loyalty set in Los Angeles. In 1992, he wrote a book featuring interviews with film director John Waters, part of the series American Originals, published by Thunder’s Mouth Press. At Bohème, he wrote an updated John Waters book (2016), and the Ciro and Sal’s Cookbook (2019).
John is also an entertainment attorney with 45 years of experience. His clients have included producers, writers and directors in film, television, animation and publishing, in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New England, Canada and the UK. For the past 25 years, many of his clients have been documentary filmmakers producing films for PBS, GBH, NET and other public television stations.
John was co-founder of Cinecom Films in New York, one of the earliest successful independent film companies and a forerunner of companies like Miramax and New Line. Following Cinecom, he was President of FilmDallas Pictures, then spent a decade in L.A. Some of the films John has been involved with include A Room With A View, Stop Making Sense, Brother From Another Planet, El Norte, Kiss Of The Spider Woman, and A Trip To Bountiful. Filmmakers with whom John has worked include Robert Altman, John Sayles, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, Jonathan Demme, and John Waters. John’s career in the film business began when he started a repertory movie theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
John’s initial legal experience was in the General Counsel’s Office at Citibank in New York. He is a graduate of NYU and Boston University School of Law. Born and raised in Manhattan, always a New Yorker at heart, John and his wife Kina have lived in Dallas, L.A., Boston, and Cape Cod—and now live in South Bristol, in stunning Mid-Coast Maine.
My HP Books
Arthur Rosen, a young man living in Brooklyn in 1936—with the Depression in full swing, his mother gone, his father a drunkard—kills a Nazi brownshirt in self-defense and must flee the country. Across the Atlantic, the democratically elected Spanish Republic is attacked by an army of mercenaries, led by Francisco Franco, whose goal is to destroy the Republic and establish a right-wing dictatorship. He is supported by the aristocracy and the Catholic Church, and receives arms and troops from Germany and Italy. 40,000 young men and women from around the world drop their lives and travel to Spain to stop the spread of fascism. Arthur joins them and becomes a soldier in the International Brigades.
A beautiful Spanish woman photographer lands an assignment to cover the growing civil war in Madrid, her childhood home—to show the world the atrocities being committed by the invading army. A young woman from a small village, a victim of those atrocities, escapes after being raped and tortured and makes her way to Madrid to join the fight.
The first novel in English fully set in the Spanish Civil War since Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, Pandaemonium Moon richly recounts Franco’s siege of Madrid, where the lives of these three individuals fatefully come together. Together they will face the long, bitter battles that ensue. The boy from New York transforms from an unfocused fugitive into a disillusioned war hero, in love with a woman stronger than he is.
The novel portrays a time when dictators in Europe and Asia used racial and ethnic resentment to build strong autocratic societies where the wealthy class could control their economies while the populace became oppressed, a time when many people were afraid of what the world was becoming. The relevance to our time is obvious. Pandaemonium Moon is a powerful story of wartime, of love, of friendship and unthinkable bravery—about the degree of courage it takes to fight the evil of fascism first hand.
