Set to Music a Wildfire

Poems by Ruth Awad

• Winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize

• Published by Southern Indiana Review Press (2017)

• Also available from Amazon

• Read “Tracers” from the book (a poem first published in KYSO Flash, Spring 2015, and nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Anthology XLI)

• “In her lovely debut, Set to Music a Wildfire, Ruth Awad rebuilds the image of a broken country and sutures the memory of a shattered family with words that can’t stop singing. A powerful homage to her father, who survived the Lebanese Civil War and emigrated to the United States and married her mother, these poems tell the story of the exile and all he left behind. ‘I carry these suitcases full of rain,’ she writes, in her father’s voice, ‘because I can’t take my country.’ These poems are alive as the keen-song of the griever and the clear-eyed and patient gaze of the children of the children of war. She writes: ‘When someone dies in Tripoli, we write their name on paper / next to their pictures and post them where others can see. / Walk the street where the names wave from the walls, / flutter from windows, buildings gilled with sheets. / breathing paper, beating paper, the streets are paper.’ In Awad’s paper streets, we can see the names and breathe.”

—Philip Metres, translator, scholar, and author of seven poetry collections

• The Best Poems Break Your Heart: An Interview with Ruth Awad

Floods and Fires

Short Stories by Dan Leach

• Published by University of North Georgia Press (2017)

• Also available from Amazon

• Read “Simple Economics” from the book (a story which first appeared in SHJ:10, Fall 2014)

• “Dan Leach’s debut collection of stories, Floods and Fires, heralds an exciting new voice in Southern fiction. Everything a reader could ask—fine writing, zany plots, and characters that strut off the page—is given generously in this collection.”

—Dale Ray Phillips, author of My People’s Waltz

• “A beautifully-written, soul-shaking collection.”

—George Singleton, Southern author of seven collections of short stories, two novels, and an instructional book on writing fiction

• Floods and Fires, the first collection of stories by Dan Leach, tests Marilynne Robinson’s assertion that ‘Families will not be broken.’ In the title story, a father harbors his fugitive son from the town bully-turned-sheriff and meditates on suffering in small towns. In ‘Everything Must Go,’ an estranged husband spots his ex-wife’s belongings at a garage sale and grapples with an onset of paranoia. In ‘Transportation,’ a trailer park outcast uses wild acts of imagination to transcend his bleak existance. Wrestling against limitations that are Southern in aesthetic but universal in nature, the characters in Floods and Fires seek redemption in the face of hard times. Quirky, outlandish, but in the end emotionally poignant, Dan Leach’s stories follow imperfect people struggling against their circumstances, their histories, and, most importantly, themselves.”

—Publisher’s description

Enter Here

Photographs and Erotic Poems by Alexis Rhone Fancher

• Featured Author in SHJ:18

• Published by KYSO Flash Press (2017)

• Also available from Amazon

• Excerpts in poet and scholar Bill Mohr’s review in Poetry Loves Poetry

• “Not only does Alexis Rhone Fancher deliver the goods, she lets us roll underneath the sheet with her. Of all the languages one can master, Alexis speaks ‘chick’ better than anyone I know. ‘This Mata Hari likes to watch,’ she says of her sister. Can a single poem capture the devastating effects of teenage adolescence and sibling rivalry in one fell swoop? It most certainly can.”

—Pam Ward, author of Want Some Get Some and Bad Girls Burn Slow

• “The book arrived. I LOVE it. So uniquely tweaked and clever and original and totally her [the author]. What a gorgeous and appropriate cover. Love the title, too.”

—Duff Brenna, from email to his SHJ colleague, Clare MacQueen

• “Alexis Rhone Fancher is not merely a detailed chronicler of our socio-physical interactions—she is by far the most exciting, articulate, and convincing storyteller in contemporary verse.”

—Gerald Locklin, poet and fiction author of 100+ books

Anaconda

A Novel by Jerry Bumpus

• Published by December Magazine and Publishing (1967)

• Available from Amazon

• Read an excerpt from the book...

• Novelist, editor, and publisher Curt Johnson referred to Anaconda as “outlaw literature,” the kind that suited his personal taste, and he published the book in 1967 after it had been rejected by commercial publishing houses. The founding editor of December Magazine had passed the reins in 1958 to Johnson, who edited the magazine for several decades. From 1962 to 2008, operating from his home in the Chicago suburbs, he also published more than 30 books under the December Press imprint, including in 1989 a second novel by Bumpus, The Happy Convent.

—Compiled by Clare MacQueen, SHJ Webmaster

• Also in SHJ:17, flash fiction by Bumpus: The Dirigible

The Fifth Eye: A Collection of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

By Roisin McLean

• Featured Author in SHJ:16

• Published by Serving House Books (December 2016)

• Read a story from the book...

• “The twofold nature of hermaphrodites; a Marine’s ‘piercing’ attempt to cope with PTSD; the anticipated destruction Hurricane Sandy will bring to America’s east coast; the leftover life that breast cancer creates for an afflicted woman trying to cope with an uncertain future; the confusing mystifications of love versus simple desire—are but a few compelling subjects found in Roisin McLean’s The Fifth Eye, an illuminating story collection displaying a dazzling, virtuoso style of writing full of unique images and observations that are at times not only gorgeously humorous but also ironically crushing.”

—Duff Brenna, award-winning author of six novels and Founding Editor of Serving House Journal

• “...As a tone painting, as well as an artwork painted with words, the final story ‘Galatea’ offers a mind-bending, multimedia experience of the complex relationship between two artists and the workings of their minds. [The Fifth Eye] is not a linked story collection, yet some settings, subjects, phrases, styles, and themes weave throughout the collection, bringing to each stand-alone story a broad resonance and perspective.”

—Serving House Books

PrimeTime

A Novel by David Memmott

• Featured Artist in SHJ:16

• Published by Wordcraft of Oregon (2007)

• Read an excerpt, The Dream Machine, in Contemporary World Literature (Issue 6, March 2011)

• “...it’s not easy to lift sci-fi to the level of literature, but Memmott has done it in brilliant fashion in PrimeTime. [...]a work that imagines a world so completely absorbed in science, so smothered in technology, that the boundaries of what is real and what is virtual reality are blurred beyond recognition. The year is 2031 and science has created multiple layers of consciousness and states of being that can be bought, adopted, used and discarded at will. Drugs can give you any mood you desire; holograms can fashion whatever surroundings you wish to imagine; genetic manipulation can keep you young, vibrant, sexually vigorous, ambitious, or tranquil. You can even be ‘resurrected’ if you have resurrection insurance....”

—Duff Brenna, from his review in SHJ:16

• “Memmott is intent on examining deep epistemological and ontological issues concerning the way humanity fashions its own reality, but he embeds his questions in a captivating thriller.... This is philosophic SF at its best.”

—Paul Di Filippo, in “On Books,” Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine (July 2008)

The Pleasures of Language

Nonfiction by Sterling K. (Skip) Eisiminger

• Published by Serving House Books (December 2016)

• “With seriously funny humor, profound insight and a vast accumulation of knowledge about ‘words, words, words’ (their origins and flexibilities), Eisiminger creates a world-class collection of beguiling essays investigating ‘the richness (and rankness) of our language and the endless variations we weave with the muscles of our mouths [which] never grow tired of studying it.’ From ‘Acronym Abuse’ to ‘Advertising Hullabaloo’ to ‘The Language of Sex’ or the definitions of ‘Tautologies,’ The Pleasures of Language frames what is, in effect, a cornucopia of word-spinning meditations exploring the inexhaustible and continually evolving nature of human discourse.”

—Duff Brenna, award-winning author of six novels and Founding Editor of Serving House Journal

The Eagle Mutiny

Nonfiction by Richard Linnett and Roberto Loiderman

• Featured Retrospective in SHJ:15

• Published by Naval Institute Press (2001)

• Available from Amazon

• Kindle (July 2015) and Nook (August 2015) ebooks, with updated info about what happened to mutineer Clyde McKay

• “A tale worthy of Conrad that reads like a Hollywood classic. The Eagle Mutiny resolves [an] historic mystery while mapping the mysteries of good and evil that fill ordinary men’s souls.”

—T. D. Allman, author of Unmanifest Destiny

• “A gripping, interwoven tale. A surreal story of protest and piracy that climaxes in the never-to-grow-up county of dreams and nightmares...the big C—Cambodia.”

—Tim Page, combat photographer and author of Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden

Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life

An Anthology Edited by Duff Brenna, Walter Cummins, Clare MacQueen, and R. A. Rycraft

• Published by Serving House Books (2015)

• Featured Poet in SHJ:12

• Read excerpts from the book...

• “Four editors and numerous poets and essayists pool their understanding of and admiration for a brilliant poet / essayist / teacher / animal-rights advocate / political activist and self-proclaimed ‘all-around no good troublemaker’ who died April 2, 2015..... The contributors to this collection have created an anthology that is also something of a biography, encomium, accolade, homage, and love-song for a master who deeply touched their lives and, in many cases, changed their art—always for the better, they say again and again in their acknowledgments.”

—Serving House Books

The Martyred

A Novel by Richard E. Kim

• Featured Retrospective in SHJ:13

• Re-issued by Penguin Classics (2011)

• Also available from Amazon

• Reviewed by Walter Cummins in SHJ:13

• “...Mr. Kim’s book stands out as one written in the great moral and psychological tradition of Job, Dostoevsky, and Albert Camus, to whose memory The Martyred is dedicated. It is a magnificent achievement, and it will last.”

—Chad Walsh, Another War Raged Within, The New York Times (16 February 1964)

• “During the early weeks of the Korean War, Captain Lee, a young South Korean officer, is ordered to investigate the kidnapping and mass murder of North Korean ministers by Communist forces. For propaganda purposes, the priests are declared martyrs, but as he delves into the crime, Lee finds himself asking: What if they were not martyrs? What if they renounced their faith in the face of death, failing both God and country? Should the people be fed this lie? Part thriller, part mystery, part existential treatise, The Martyred is a stunning meditation on truth, religion, and faith in times of crisis.”

—Penguin Group LLC (2011)

Cherish: New and Selected Poems

By Steve Kowit

• Featured Poet in SHJ:12

• Published by University of Tampa Press (2015)

• Official Release Announcement

• Read a poem from the book...

• Steve Kowit reads his poem “Cherish”

• “How fine to have in our hands...the lucid, voluptuous, exuberant poems of Steve Kowit.”

—Dorianne Laux, author of five poetry collections and co-author of the celebrated text The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop

By Steve Kowit

• Featured Poet in SHJ:12

• Published by Tilbury House Publishers (2003)

• Also available from Amazon

• “An illuminating and invaluable guide for beginners wary of modern poetry, as well as for more advanced students who want to sharpen their craft and write poems that expand their technical skills, excite their imaginations, and engage their deepest memories and concerns. Ideal for teachers who have been searching for a way to inspire students with a love for writing—and reading—contemporary poetry, this book is used in high schools, colleges, universities, and writing workshops across the country.”

—Tilbury House Publishers

Lurid Confessions

Poems by Steve Kowit

• Featured Poet in SHJ:12

• Portfolio Two: Ten Poems from Lurid Confessions

• Published by Serving House Books (2010)

• Available from Amazon

• “...a verse perfectly apt for our epoch: half flamboyant farce, and half sebastomanic matanza.”

—Howard Flowerd

ART: Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman

A Memoir by Laurie Pepper

• Featured Author in SHJ:12

• Published by CreateSpace (May, 2014)

• [This memoir] describes [Laurie Pepper’s] marriage to the deeply troubled, drug-addicted, madly gifted artist [Art Pepper]. “That marriage was the making of me,” says Laurie. “Some people go to grad school or join the Marines. I married a genius who valued and inspired me and challenged me to use MY gifts. We had a difficult, powerful partnership. I had to tell that story.” She says she also needs to set the record straight and clarify her role: “People think I was some kind of little wifey-saint who rescued him. And Art encouraged them in that. But he knew how truly crazy I could be. We rescued each other.”

—Terri Hinte in All About Jazz (5 May 2014)

• Read an excerpt from ART: Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman...

One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding

A Novel by Robert Gover

• Featured Author in SHJ:11

• First published in the United States by Grove Press in 1962

• Latest edition released by Hopewell Publications in 2005

• “What a find! I’ve been recommending it to everyone. This book should create a sensation.”

—Henry Miller, author of several novels which were banned in the United States, including Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939)

• “In the late 1950’s, you couldn’t even curse in a novel. You had to dance around sex, and you certainly couldn’t portray race relations in an honest light. How in the world was a realistic story ever told? Along comes Robert Gover, an American whose novel was exiled to Europe by the puritan values that would soon tumble. [This novel] makes cartoon characters out of the stereotypes that dominated the races by sneaking them under the cultural radar in the bodies of a young black prostitute and a rich white college kid. This oil and water relationship has more in common than one might think. Before this quick and engaging read is over, the genius becomes the fool, the chicken becomes the fox, and the reader just might question his/her own assumptions.”

—Hopewell Publications

• Read Gover’s essay re the evolution of his cult classic...

Beneath the Neon Egg

A Novel by Thomas E. Kennedy

• Published by Bloomsbury (2014)

• Also available from Amazon

• “Brilliantly atmospheric, with a smorgasbord of edgy sexual encounters, Kennedy’s novel is a symphony of loneliness and longing which completely absorbs the reader and grips the heart.”

—From John Harding’s review in MailOnline (dailymail.co.uk, 30 October 2014)

• Details about The Copenhagen Quartet

• See also Falling Sideways

• See also In the Company of Angels

• See also Kerrigan in Copenhagen: A Love Story

Midnight Rumba

A Novel by Eduardo Santiago

• Featured Author in SHJ:10

• Published by Create Space Independent Publishing Platform (2013)

• Available from Amazon

• “Eduardo Santiago is on fire!”

—David Sedaris, NPR humorist and best-selling author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and other collections

• Read an excerpt from Midnight Rumba...

Pirates You Don’t Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

By John Griswold

• Featured Author in SHJ:9 [*]

• Published by The University of Georgia Press (2014)

• Also available from Amazon

• Reviewed by Duff Brenna in SHJ:10

• “A gorgeous and profound look at life, death, transience, toil, class, and family.”

—From publisher’s description

[* Also featured in SHJ:2 for the novel, A Democracy of Ghosts]

Rewiring the Weird [Annual Journal of New Fabulism]

Phantom Drift 3

• Complete details at the Phantom Drift website

• Published by Wordcraft of Oregon (2013)

• Also available from Amazon

• “...featuring the best fabulist literature submitted to the non-profit journal in 2013. Includes fiction, poetry and commentary...”

—From publisher’s description

The Shyster’s Daughter

A Memoir by Paula Priamos

• Published by Etruscan Press (3 July 2012)

• Also available from Amazon

• “The mysterious death of a high-profile defense lawyer propels his daughter into an investigation of the shady deals and characters that led to his disbarment. This searing detective noir memoir paints a vivid portrait of a Greek American family caught up in the scandal-obsessed, drug-addicted culture of California in the closing decades of the twentieth century.”

—From publisher’s description

• “Priamos proves herself to be not only a keen observer of the ways we love and bear loss, but also a first-rate storyteller.”

—Will Allison, author of New York Times Bestseller, Long Drive Home

• “...utterly absorbing and packed with sharp details. Direct, evocative, emotionally honest, brave, and funny, Priamos’ voice shines. The Shyster’s Daughter is a suspenseful investigative journey, but its emotional core vibrates with Priamos’ homage to her deeply flawed and deeply loved father, and to their complicated and enduring relationship.”

—Victoria Patterson, author of This Vacant Paradise

The Year Lived Over and Over

Poems by Clyde Fixmer

• Available for $10 (USD), postage paid, from:

Dragonfly Press
PO Box 746
Columbia CA 95310

• “Each page is packed with striking eruptions of imagery, all of it expressed in openhearted language that never hides its meaning inside mystifying metaphors or inexplicable verse. This is a radiant work...”

—Duff Brenna, author of Murdering the Mom

• “Clyde Fixmer is a poet who is willing to confront our present cultural and spiritual malaise head-on. These poems wrestle with our deepest psychological fears and show the author’s love of humanity despite its frailties....”

—Tom McKeown, author of The Luminous Revolver

Visions of a Wayne Childhood

“21 Brief Sketches” by DeWitt Henry

• CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
(October 2012)

• Details at author’s website

• First-rate reviews at Amazon

• An Interview by Derek Alger in SHJ:7

• “Filled with precisely etched detail, these miniature memoirs offer a stunning amount of storytelling compressed into small, gem-like spaces...”

—Cam Terwilliger, Louisiana State University

• “Finely crafted snapshots of life...yet another glowing example of the fine work of a gifted artist...”

—James Brown, author of the memoirs, This River and The Los Angeles Diaries

A Song of Innocence

A Novel by Greg Herriges

• Featured Author in SHJ:7

• Published in ebook format by Bookbaby (Feb 2013)

• Reviewed by Duff Brenna in SHJ:7

• The story that inspired the novel

• “A compelling look at the vagaries of family dynamics and the austere realities of human biology.... Jesse and Nina Dillon are your typical American parents, raising a nine-year-old daughter, Christy, the best they can, and enjoying the fruits of their labor of love, until the unthinkable happens....

• “Herriges chronicles the lonely journey of one man’s soul as he attempts to keep alive love, hope, and desire in the face of almost certain defeat on all fronts. Ultimately, the question of whether there is an afterlife becomes secondary to his daughter’s transcendent and resolute discovery that ‘There is no death.’”

—From publisher’s description

Kerrigan in Copenhagen: A Love Story

A Novel by Thomas E. Kennedy

• Published by Bloomsbury (2013)

• Also available from Amazon

• “Kerrigan is writing a guide book to his adopted city of Copenhagen. Specifically, a guide to the city’s drinking establishments—of which there are more than 1,500. Thus, it is a project potentially without end, and one with a certain amount of numbness built into it, through countless drinks imbibed. And that is part of the point: for Kerrigan, an American expat fleeing a brutal family tragedy, has plenty he wants to numb. The only problem with his project is his research associate, a voluptuous, green-eyed gal who makes him tremble with forgotten desire. Kerrigan in Copenhagen is a love story. It is also a deeply human, Joycean romp through a magical city—its people, history, literature, and culture—giving Copenhagen its literary due and establishing Kennedy as a tremendously gifted novelist.”

—From The Book Depository

• Details about The Copenhagen Quartet

• See also Beneath the Neon Egg

• See also Falling Sideways

• See also In the Company of Angels

The Chronology of Water: A Memoir

By Lidia Yuknavitch

• Introduction by Chelsea Cain

• Published by Hawthorne Books (April 2011)

• Also available from Amazon

• “I’ve read this book, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary.”

—Chuck Palahniuk, author of Pygmy and Fight Club

• “...this bold and highly unconventional book—hot, gritty, unrelenting in its push to dismantle the self and then, somehow, put the self back together again—gets not just under a reader’s skin but seeps all the way into her bloodstream.”

—Debra Gwartney, author of Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir, from a review in The Oregonian

The Law of Falling Bodies

A Novel by Duff Brenna

• Reprinted by Nine Lives Editions, a division of Serving House Books (August 2012)

• Available from Amazon

• “Fifteen-year-old Virgil Foggy is trying to survive on a failing dairy farm in Minnesota. [His] mother is pregnant—an unwelcome addition to the family. [His] older brother joins the army and goes to war, but warfare is also close to home, much of it between Virgil and his stepfather. The Law of Falling Bodies is a novel about the schizophrenic, ubiquitous, and cyclical nature of all wars within and between men, women, and nations.”

—Book description at Amazon

Overpass

Poems by Steve Davenport

• Featured Author in SHJ:6

• Available only from Misty Publications (July 2012)

• “Overpass creates a startling and delightful tension between its richly gritty content and a craft that crashes through its own formal restraints with deft use of wordplay, syntax, allusion, and joyful sound...”

—Martha Collins, author of White Papers

Bumper Sticker Liberalism: Peeling Back the Idiocies of the Political Left

An Iconoclastic Satire by Mark Goldblatt

• Published by Broadside Books (July 2012)

• Author Bio at Amazon

• Goldblatt also wrote the controversial novel, Africa Speaks, a satire of black urban culture, and Sloth, a comedic novel on postmodernism [which was reviewed in SHJ:3].

• “Insightful and irreverent in just the right way, Bumper Sticker Liberalism takes on, and takes apart, the cozy cognitive knee jerks of actual liberal bumper stickers—on topics ranging from race relations to the nanny state, from global warming to tax policy, from war and peace to Bush Derangement Syndrome.”

—From publisher’s description

Without Sin

A Novel by David S. McCabe

• Published by Sunstone Press (April 2012)

• Also available from Amazon

• “McCabe’s dramatic debut novel brings together a border patrol agent, a Mexican prostitute, and a charming but ruthless cartel drug lord. The agent wants to buy the prostitute out of bondage to the drug lord. Another twist on Romeo & Juliet? Or does love conquer all this time? From the first page to the last, Without Sin tells a powerful and provocative story that will leave you thinking long after you have finished reading. This book would likely be banned in Arizona.”

—Duff Brenna, author of nine books, including the novel Too Cool, a New York Times Notable Book

• “[The outdoor brothel of] Los Carrizales was a real place and scores of undocumented young women were brutalized daily along the San Luis Rey River in the quiet community of Oceanside California before a coordinated effort by the San Diego County Sheriff, FBI and Border Patrol shut it down. …I felt compelled as a researcher, an educator and a parent to bear witness to these events and the incalculable harm that racism, sexism and bigotry inflict upon us all.”

—David S. McCabe, on the background of this book

Minnesota Memoirs Short Stories by Duff Brenna • Available from Amazon (April 2012)

Click to enlarge

• “…quintessential Duff…one of those storytellers who gets it right in every sentence. A master craftman’s master crafstman…”

—Steve Davenport, author of Uncontainable Noise

Murdering the Mom

A Memoir by Duff Brenna

• Published by Wordcraft of Oregon (June 2012)

• “…Brenna reaches deep into the darkest recesses of the human psyche.…a brilliant writer transcends the tragic and turns this powerful, raw, heartfelt story into the finest art.”

—James Brown, author of This River

From the Crooked Timber

A Novella and Stories by Okla Elliott

• Featured Author in SHJ:5

• Reviewed by Robert Petersen

• Published by Press 53 (Nov 2011)

• Also available from Amazon

• “…Bleakly beautiful. A feast of irony and in-your-face attitude punctuated with strokes of subtle humor.”

—Duff Brenna, author of nine books, including the novel Too Cool, a New York Times Notable Book

This Mobius Strip of Ifs

Essays by Mathias B. Freese

• First place, general nonfiction, 2012 Indie Excellence Book Awards

• Available from Amazon (Feb 2012)

• Reviewed by Lisa Taylor in Writer’s Block Party

Winter Tales: Men Write About Aging

Edited by Duff Brenna and Thomas E. Kennedy

• Published by Serving House Books (Oct 2011)

• Available from Amazon

• See also Winter Tales II: Women on the Art of Aging

• An engaging collection of musings (poems, essays, and illustrations) from 30 notable authors and artists, including Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Mailer and Stephen Dunn, Poets Laureate Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins, and National Book Critics Circle Award winners Albert Goldbarth and Jack Marshall

Our Daily Bread

A Novel by Lauren B. Davis

• Featured Author in SHJ:4

• Author interviewed in SHJ:5

• Published by Wordcraft of Oregon (Oct 2011)

• “…a powerful, harrowing and deeply unsettling work. …the sort of novel that keeps you reading even as your skin crawls and your blood pressure mounts....”

—Robert J. Wiersema, Quill & Quire starred review

The Bay of Marseilles and Other Stories

By Greg Herriges

• Published by Serving House Books (Sep 2011)

• “…a brilliant collection of stories, precise in details—about possibility and yearning and loss and intimacy—and sweeping in scope. What a fine, fine book this is….”

—Tony Romano, author of When the World Was Young

Korean Echoes: A Collection Not By the Numbers But in Alpha Formation

Poems by Tom Sheehan

• Published by MilSpeak Books (Sep 2011)

• Also available from Barnes & Noble

• “…steel moments of clarity rendered from language…a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit to survive the killing fields of war through time eternal.”

—Barnes & Noble overview

This River

A Memoir by James Brown

• Featured Author in SHJ:3

• Published by Counterpoint Press (listed in their Spring 2011 catalog, page 59)

• “…raw and palpable and beats like a heart. Brown gave everything he had: infinite strength, exacting discipline, fearsome courage… When you put this book down, trust me, you will think about it for a long time.”

—Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse

Falling Sideways

A Novel by Thomas E. Kennedy

• Published by Bloomsbury (2011)

• Also available from Amazon

• “Falling Sideways is that rarest of commodities in American literary fiction, a novel about men and women at work; it is part satire and part drama, and it is very smart.”

—The Washington Post

• “Sharp, funny, but remarkably tender, Falling Sideways is the second book in Kennedy’s virtuoso Copenhagen Quartet, and a book that will continue to build his reputation as one of America’s most versatile literary novelists.”

—Bloomsbury Publishing

• Details about The Copenhagen Quartet

• See also Beneath the Neon Egg

• See also In the Company of Angels

• See also Kerrigan in Copenhagen

A Democracy of Ghosts

A Novel by John Griswold

• Featured Author in SHJ:2 [*]

• “A brilliant and lyrical historical novel…conjures the affairs behind one of the most violent labor disputes in American history—the brutal killing of 21 scabs and coal miners…”

—The Huffington Post

[* Also featured in SHJ:9 for Pirates You Don’t Know And Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays]

What We Choose to Remember

A Memoir by Steve Heller

• “…The narrative essays in What We Choose to Remember tread the tenuous, shifting grounds of memory, revealing how our imperfect recollections shape not only how we live our lives, but [also] the act of storytelling itself.”

—Serving House Books

Lurid Confessions

Poems by Steve Kowit

• Featured Poet in SHJ:2

• “…a verse perfectly apt for our epoch: half flamboyant farce, and half sebastomanic matanza.”

—Howard Flowerd

The Holy Book of the Beard

A Novel by Duff Brenna

• “If Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, Damon Runyon, John Kennedy Toole, and Samuel Beckett were all rolled into one literary package, the result would be Duff Brenna’s [novel]…an uproarious ride…”

—Lauren B. Davis, author of The Stubborn Season

The End of the Circle

Stories by Walter Cummins

• “…stories of men and women displaced: from their homelands, from lovers, from families, from careers and ambitions, but most poignantly (and often chillingly) from themselves…”

—Peter Selgin, author of Drowning Lessons

The Book of Worst Meals: 25 Authors Write about Terrible Culinary Experiences

Edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy

• “…tales of wretched dining in Paris, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and throughout the UK, as well as disastrous holiday meals and the food of failed relationships.”

—Serving House Books

Usher

Poems by B. H. Fairchild

• “…one of those poets prose readers love: Meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, [Fairchild] stakes out an American mythos in which the personal and the collective blur…”

—David L. Ulin, book editor, Los Angeles Times

The Consequence of Skating

A Novel by Steven Gillis

• “…blends politics, drama, ice skating, mountain climbing, the music industry and world affairs—not to mention artificial intelligence and G.O.D.—to create an inimitable tour de force.”

—Dzanc Books

In the Company of Angels

A Novel by Thomas E. Kennedy

• Featured Author in SHJ:1

• Published by Bloomsbury (2011)

• Also available from Amazon

• “With generous and elegant prose, Kennedy takes us from the darkest, most violent regions of our collective behavior to our most exalted... A deeply stirring novel, suffused with intelligence, grace, and that rarest of qualities—wisdom.”

—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

• Details about The Copenhagen Quartet

• See also Beneath the Neon Egg

• See also Falling Sideways

• See also Kerrigan in Copenhagen

Signposts to Elsewhere: A Book of Aphorisms, Epigrams, Maxims, and Other Tailored Thoughts

By Yahia Lababidi

• “That little book is brilliant…think of the wild mind of Blake and the calmly collected Wallace Stevens, with a touch of Franz Kafka’s hammer inside a velvet glove.”

—Duff Brenna, author of nine books, including the novel Too Cool, a New York Times Notable Book

Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing

Literary and Cultural Essays by Yahia Lababidi

• “…his sentences… spring back to the touch… There is also a finely calibrated sense of the absurd, the whimsical, the slyly surrealistic throughout…”

—Eric Ormsby, author of Ghazali (Makers of the Muslim World)

Speech Acts

Poems by Laura McCullough

• “Bold, witty, erotic, and provocative, McCullough’s poems re-imagine for our time E. M. Forster’s tremendous artistic and humane injunction: ‘only connect!’”

—Fred Marchant, author of Tipping Point, winner of the Washington Prize in poetry

Pirate Talk or Mermalade

A Novel by Terese Svoboda

• Author interviewed in SHJ:2

• “Told entirely through dialogue, this quirky tale of period pirate wannabes makes a jeu d’esprit of the privateer life even as it baldly de-romanticizes it.”

—Publisher’s Weekly, 20 July 2010