James Eckardt

Biography

James Eckardt lived in Thailand for 30 years, half in his wife's hometown of Songkhla, the scene of his novel "Boat People" and his first story collection "Waylaid by the Bimbos", and half in Bangkok, his base for the profiles in "Bangkok People" and his second book of stories "On the Bus with Yobs, Frogs, Sods and the Lovely Lena". A year in Cambodia furnished the material for "The Year of LIving Stupidly".

A former Catholic seminarian, civil rights worker and Peace Corps volunteer, James Eckardt has also written the novels "Alabama Days" and "Running with the Sharks", a fourth story collection "Thai Jinks: Madcap Misadventures on Land and Sea in Thailand", and a memoir: "Singapore GIrl".

"I was fascinated by "Singapore Girl", a love story like no other -- bizarre and oddly moving." -- Paul Theroux

Where to find James Eckardt online

Where to buy in print

Books

Bangkok People
Price: $4.99 USD. Words: 65,020. Language: English. Published: August 7, 2016 by Proglen. Categories: Nonfiction » Travel » By region » Asia, Nonfiction » History » Asian » Asia / Southeast Asia
The profiles, mostly written for the Manager Magazine, before the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis of which the magazine ended up a victim, was from the time of Bangkok booming. Will it ever get quite up to those good-time heights again? Dig in and enjoy these vignettes of the real people who populated this wonderful city.
Thai Jinks
Price: $4.95 USD. Words: 74,780. Language: English. Published: June 13, 2015 by Proglen. Categories: Fiction » Humor & comedy » General, Nonfiction » Travel » By region » Asia
Through the eighties and nineties and into the new century we followed the humorous adventures of Jim Eckardt in both of Bangkok's daily English language newspapers, the Bangkok Post and the Nation. You see, things happened to Jim. It often involved beer. Some of these things weren't so good, but they were always funny and never dull.
Alabama Days
Price: $4.95 USD. Words: 139,650. Language: English. Published: August 31, 2014 by Proglen. Categories: Fiction » Historical » USA, Fiction » Plays & Screenplays » American
Alabama Days by James Eckardt, cover design by Colin Cotterill A few weeks after the 1965 Selma March, four teenage Catholic seminarians from Long Island arrive in Birmingham, Alabama, to work for Father Edmund Fraser in a door-to-door voter registration campaign. Nights, they return to the same black neighborhoods to play guitars and lead crowds in singing freedom songs.
Running with the Sharks
Price: $4.95 USD. Words: 57,280. Language: English. Published: December 1, 2013 by Proglen. Categories: Fiction » Thriller & suspense » Crime thriller, Fiction » Adventure » Sea adventures
Running with the Sharks is a novel of stark human conflict set in the lawless isolation of an uninhabited island off Thailand’s Andaman coast.
Boat People
Price: $4.99 USD. Words: 96,120. Language: English. Published: October 9, 2013 by Proglen. Categories: Fiction » Plays & Screenplays » Asian, Fiction » Historical » General
Boat People is a panoramic novel of greed and compassion, violence and family love, desperation and hope. It is September 1981, the high tide of boat people flight from Vietnam. From the Mekong Delta port of Rach Gia, one boat, crammed with fishermen, farmers, political refugees, and urban hustlers, runs a 300-mile gauntlet of pirates and storms for the safe haven of Songkhla Refugee Camp.