Rebel.Rebel Press publishes the fiction. The novels are built the way the letters are built: from a real record, inside a real industry, with the paperwork left in.
UNIFORMS: How America Dressed Itself
America did not just build railroads, factories, ranches, cities and fortunes. It dressed itself.
A boot became permission to enter the room. A pair of jeans became proof of work. A collar became respectability. A razor made the modern face possible.
Eventually the objects became so familiar we stopped seeing what they were doing.
A cycle of historical novels about the ordinary objects America used to make itself legible. Each book begins with a familiar piece of the American wardrobe and goes underneath the usable story: into the workshops, archives, advertisements, patents, payrolls and forgotten hands that made the object mean something in the first place.
Not histories of products. Stories about what people wore to become who America required them to be.
ROOMS: Rooms of Texas
Book One. The cowboy boot.
Before the cowboy boot became an American icon, it had to get into the room.
San Antonio, 1882. Salvatore Lucchese arrives from Sicily with his family, a workbench, and an understanding that America has rules nobody bothers to write down. The right name helps. The right customers help more. And the right pair of boots can carry a person across a threshold that money alone cannot open.
More than a century later, a writer hired to tell the clean version opens a box and finds something inconvenient: the company did not begin with the cowboy at all.
America did not invent the cowboy. The cowboy was real. The costume came later.
First edition, available now. Buy the first edition
RIVETS
Book Two. The copper rivet.
Everybody knows who invented the blue jean. That is the problem.
In 1871 a woman walked into a Nevada tailor shop with a pair of pants that kept coming apart. Her name was never recorded. The tailor was Jacob Davis. His solution was simple: put metal rivets where the fabric failed. He could not afford the patent. Levi Strauss could.
A western legal thriller about invention, ownership, labour, and the peculiar American machinery that turns many hands into one man’s name.
The founding story is not a lie. It is a selection. And labels have limited space.
Coming soon.
THE TURN
Johan Cruyff and the architecture of football.
In 1974 Johan Cruyff turned a Swedish defender the wrong way. Nothing came of it. No goal, no assist, the match finished nil-nil. Football kept the moment anyway.
There are two words underneath the book. Pitch and ground. The pitch is the surface: grass, lines, angles, space, and it can be redrawn. The ground is the place: owned, inherited, named, defended.
Cruyff mastered the first. The second kept defeating him. What survived him was the space.
Forthcoming.
THE FALSE FIRE
Some places can be conquered. Others can only be belonged to.
On the coast of Brittany there is a passage through the water that does not appear correctly on any map. The people who know it call it the cut, and for a thousand years its keeping passes from one generation to the next.
When a stranger approaches in good faith, a true fire guides the ship into safe harbour. When someone comes believing access is already theirs, another light can be shown. It looks like welcome. It leads somewhere else.
The danger is never only the enemy. Sometimes the most dangerous person is the one who genuinely loves you and slowly begins to believe that love has given them a right to what is yours to protect.
Forthcoming.
THE JEWELBOUND CHRONICLES
A fantasy series written by a father and daughter about three siblings who discover that the strange old stories surrounding their hometown may not be stories at all.
Izzy is the first to move. Luka sees patterns everyone else misses. Their little brother Ren glows when the world is trying to tell them something.
Together they follow old books, hidden paths, impossible animals, and the changing light of Sparkle Springs into a world much older than they imagined. These are adventure stories for children who can handle mystery, danger, beauty and questions without being handed every answer.
The world is speaking in its first language. The children are learning to answer back.
Book One. The Legend of Sparkle Canyon.
Sparkle Springs has always glittered. Then one morning, the sparkle is gone. Ren has begun to glow. An old bedtime story suddenly sounds less like a story. And somewhere beyond town, a mountain lion with impossible purple eyes is waiting in Sparkle Canyon.
Izzy, Luka and Ren follow the clues into a place older and stranger than anything they have been told, and discover that finding the light may be much easier than understanding who it belongs to.
The stones glitter. The stones remember. These are not the same thing.
Book Two. The River of Glass.
They found the hidden world. Now they have to learn how to read it.
A silver line has appeared beneath the creek. Something impossible is watching Luka and Ren from underwater. And the old books in their house are beginning to reveal a history their family has never fully explained.
The River of Glass remembers what Sparkle Springs has forgotten. But water does not remember like stone. Here reflections can mislead, Ren’s glow cannot always be trusted, and Luka can read every clue correctly and still arrive at the wrong answer.
The river does not lie. That does not mean you understand what it shows you.
Both forthcoming. Written by I.E. Nolan and A.K. Nolan.
Rebel.Rebel Press. We make cultural property.