“Mike Figliola’s The Slow Midnight on Cypress Avenue is a street level gaze at Queens, New York in the offbeat tradition of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. There is a raw honesty to this three-part novel which kept me spellbound. Figliola is an irrepressible writer with the heart of a poet and the eyes of a journalist. Highly recommended!!—Douglas Brinkley, Editor of Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac and Literary Executor of the Hunter S. Thompson Estate So, who are these irregular regulars of Cypress Avenue? Set over the course of one Sunday, The Slow Midnight on Cypress Avenue is a collection of interconnected vignettes that takes the reader through the streets and across sidewalks of Cypress Avenue—an unkempt afterthought, just a place that sits at the neighborhood border edge of Ridgewood Queens, NY. The three-part book—broken into Morning, Afternoon, and Night—introduces you to the irregular regulars of the human race. There is the soft and strange relationship between the eccentric Samuel Jean and a young girl of Puerto Rican descent named Desponda “Dezzy” Rivera. There’s “Old” Goldie Samuels, a washed-up relic who spends her days spinning yarns and getting free drinks at the local liquor store. But the story is truly centered on Corporal Benjamin Zogby, a veteran who spends his days alone on his stoop watching the bus go by and wishing his love would return to him. It’s his tragic fate that sends the avenue and the other inhabitants you’ll meet—Earl the fisherman, Father John White, among others—into an unstoppable tailspin toward unexpected change and inner destruction.