Dust Devil on a Quiet Street chronicles the remarkable life of Boston-born, New York City-reared author Richard Bowes. Bowes's childhood and adolescent brushes with dramatic spirits and hustlers, large and small, paved the way for his adult encounters with the remarkable, the numinous, the supernatural. Deftly orchestrated, this "memoir" is part impassioned homage to Manhattan—decades before and up to its recent wound on September 11th, which creates a hole in the city and allows the ghosts of the dead to return—and part tell-all of the uncanny secrets behind a group of Greenwich Village writers and life as a university librarian.

"Decades of a troubled and magical life in New York are described in this fascinating fictionalized memoir....Bowes the character comes across as a very real individual, surrounding himself with a host of memorable and eclectic people. Bowes the author depicts a New York at once beautiful and terrible, dangerous and glorious, where mundane life is only one step away from the supernatural." — Publishers Weekly