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Cynthia Barrett — "Know any sailors? Are you a beachcomber? Land lover?? Three Sheets to the Wind: The Nautical Origins of Everyday Expressions, the seafaring compendium will be a perfect Father's day or summer weekend present. Follow this link for a quick and easy lesson in all words nautical. |
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Barrie Jean Borich — Borich is the author of Apocalypse, Darling (Ohio State University Press: Mad Creek Crooks/Machete Series in Literary Nonfiction 2018). PopMatters said "Apocalypse, Darling soars and seems to live as a new form altogether. It's poetry, a meditation on life as "the other," creative non-fiction, and abstract art." Her memoir Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press/American Lives Series 2013) won a Lambda Literary Award in Memoir, an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) Gold Medal in Essay/Creative Nonfiction, and a 2013 Forward INDIE Bronze Award for Essays. In a starred review Kirkus called Body Geographic "an elegant literary map that celebrates shifting topographies as well as human bodies in motion, not only across water and land, but also through life." Borich's previous book, My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf 1999, 2000), won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, and her first book, Restoring the Color of Roses (1993), was published by Firebrand Books, an independent feminist press. barriejeanborich.com |
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Kate Bornstein — Vintage published a new and improved 20th anniversary edition of Gender Outlaw. And Routledge brought out a second edition of My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity. Check out director Sam Feder's film Kate Bornstein is a Queer & Pleasant Danger, based on A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today. Follow this link to Beacon's interview with Kate Bornstein on YouTube. Guess who is reading A Queer & Pleasant Danger? Follow this link for the answer! Read Kate’s essay in the We Can Do Better anthology, due out summer 2021 from Vintage. |
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Blanche McCrary Boyd — In Boyd's 2019 Pen Faulkner Finalist Tomb of the Unknown Racist, Ellen Burns is a former activist and fugitive who must reckon with the sins of her dead brother, a talented novelist who fell under the sway of White Supremacy, when his grandchildren are abducted by an unknown force, leading her to the underworld of secret militias across the southwest, in the shadow of the Oklahoma City bombing. Follow this link to read the Publishers Weekly review of Tomb of the Unknown Racist. And click here to read Boyd's essay "Who the F*** are the Boogaloos?" |
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Dan Callahan — Crosby, Holiday, Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Garland, and Streisand were the major interpreters of the American songbook. Bing and Billie and Frank and Ella and Judy and Barbra is the interlocking story of their lives and careers. All six singers reach out and show us new ways of expression, new ways to dream and their melody still lingers on. Chicago Review Press publishes in 2023. Who isn't in awe of Vanessa Redgrave? Her career on stage and screen remains vital and her extreme-left political stands are still quite controversial. In this first-ever biography of the woman many have called our greatest living actress, the formidable Vanessa Redgrave is at last revealed to us in all of her different personas. About Redgrave, David Thomson writes, "She has made mistakes, but there is a case for her as the best actress alive, ready for further challenge." Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave, published in 2014 by Pegasus. |
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Mary Cappello — Cappello's seven books of literary nonfiction include a Los Angeles Times bestselling detour on awkwardness, a lyric biography, and the mood fantasia Life Breaks In. A former Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, she is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. Fordham University Press just reissued Called Back: A Return to Life, including a new Afterword. It was honored with a ForeWord Book of the Year Award, an Independent Publishers Prize and a Gamma Award, as well as being both a Lambda and Publishing Triangle Finalist. Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and The Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them was published by The New Press. University of Chicago Press published Life Breaks In, her groundbreaking study on mood in 2016. Moody? Read all about it...poetic and literary, a lyric meditation. Life Breaks In has been featured on Large Hearted Boy, Berfrois, NPR Berlin, The American Academy in Berlin and The Millions. PopSugar calls it "one of ten books to keep you centered after the election"; Brit + Co includes it among "the three new books to set your imagination ablaze"; Kirkus Starred Review describes it as “An illuminating celebration of enveloping moments of being.” Read Cappello's How We Escape It: An Essay delivered what she called a (Low) Keynote in pandemic times for NonfictioNow Conference, which took place (virtually) in Wellington, New Zealand, this year (December 2021). PAUSE REWIND PLAY is a digitally-mediated love-note, to bridge community, trace movement and investigate pause. Fellow Keynoters were Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Behrouz Bouchani. Transit Books publishes Cappello’s Lecture to much acclaim: |
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Barbara Carrellas — Following the success of Urban Tantra, Hay House published Ecstasy is Necessary. Not your ordinary tips-and-techniques sex book; rather Ecstasy is Necessary is an exploratory journey of the sexual self and the infinite possibilities of ecstatic expression. Carrellas teaches readers how to discover, nurture, expand and embrace their authentic, ever-evolving, sensual, sexual self. Using stories and simple exercises, readers discover their authentic sexual selves and create the conditions that allow more and more of their experiences and relationships to be opportunities for — and invitations to — ecstasy. In 2018, expect a revised & updated 2nd edition of Urban Tantra. And follow this link to listen to an audio version of Urban Tantra. |
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Alexandra Chasin — Harry J. Anslinger was the architect of our busted War on Drugs and was arguably as perverse and dangerous as J. Edgar Hoover. Chasin's Assassin of Youth is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the fractured man who set up America for one of its biggest public policy failures of the twentieth century, and beyond. "A swirling, energetic, decidedly offbeat history of a man and a time history has largely forgotten, and not for any lack of effort of his own." — Kirkus Reviews |
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Janyce Stefan-Cole — It was during a months' long junket in the Hollywood Hills that the character of Ardennes Thrush came to Stefan-Cole—and that lead to Hollywood Boulevard, "A little bit quirky, a little bit noir ... an intriguing crime novel with a pitch-perfect narration that sucks you right into the peculiar business that makes Hollywood what it is—and the equally peculiar business of finding one's muse." — Booklist |
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Raymond and Lorna Coppinger — Is it a graphic novel or a fishing dog guide book? Skyhorse Press reissued Fishing Dogs: A Guide to the History, Talents, and Training of the Baildale, the Flounderhounder, the Angler Dog and Sundry Other Breeds of Aquatic Dogs (Canis piscatorius). How Dogs Work and What Is a Dog published by University of Chicago Press are perfect for any dog lover's library. Raymond Coppinger died in 2017. "Ray and Lorna Coppinger's Dogs should forever change the way we look at humans' 'best friends.' Both dog owners and those who want to be will profit by their description of how genes and environmental signals make the dog very much not a wolf."
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Kia Corthron — Campbell Prize winner Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (Seven Stories Press, 2016) was awarded the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and listed in the New York Times Book Review Paperback Row. Her long-awaited second novel Moon and the Mars is set in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City in the years 1857-1863. We experience neighborhood life through the eyes of Theo from childhood to adolescence, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandparents. Theo witnesses everything from the creation of tap dance to P.T. Barnum's sensationalist museum to the draft riots that tear NYC asunder. Meanwhile, white America's attitudes towards people of color and slavery are shifting—painfully, transformationally—as the nation divides and marches to war. "There are whole chunks of writing here that are simply sublime, places in which one gets swept away by the way [Corthron] subverts the rhythm of language to illuminate the familiar and allow it to be seen fresh. ... [The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter] succeeds admirably in a novel's first and most difficult task: It makes you give a damn. It also does well by a novel's second task: It sends you away pondering what it has to say." — The New York Times Sunday Book Review (Editor's Choice) "A stunning achievement by any measure." — Angela Y. Davis |
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Patty Dann — Best known for Mermaids, her first novel, which was made into a movie with Cher, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci. In The Wright Sister, Dann goes full circle in this epistolary novel imagining the life of whip smart and early feminist, Katharine Wright and her relationship with her famous brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright. As the years pass, the siblings grow further and further apart. Katharine reveals herself in her “Marriage Diary” — as a frank and socially engaged active woman coming into her own. Her one-sided correspondence with her estranged brother Orv, only underscores how she hopes to repair their fractured relationship through forgiveness. The Wright Sister is an unforgettable portrait of a woman, a sister of inventors, who found a way to reinvent herself. "No longer hidden by history, the wind beneath Wilbur and Orville’s wings — their brainy sibling Katharine — soars in The Wright Sister. Patty Dann’s cunning epistolary page-turner chronicles a woman taking flight past fifty while it reflects on sexual awakening, early feminism, and the unbreakable bonds of filial love. Immensely readable!" — Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise and the international best-seller The Late, Lamented Molly Marx The Butterfly Hours is a collection of life prompts for writing with anecdotes and stories from the lives of her students and the people around her. Dann was cited by New York Magazine as one of the "Great Teachers of NYC." Listen to the podcast of Minnie Driver reading of one of Dann's Modern Love essays. "Patty Dann has collected 25 years of teaching experience in this generous book of advice to writers. She delivers a series of prompts that open up tiny worlds of memory and feeling. If God is in the details, God is here." — Betsy Lerner, author of The Forest for the Trees Forward.com: Why We Adored Patty Dann's Butterfly Hours Publishers Weekly: Best Books for Writers |
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Margaret Erhart — "The desert air can do funny things to a person, and soon this respectable woman falls in love with another man. It all feels like an E. M. Forster novel, but set in the scenic American West." |
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"A magisterial work on a great subject. This is a book everyone should read." — Susan Sontag A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture was re-issued by Oxford University Press in an updated edition. A 1998 New York Times Notable Book and Notable Paperback, a Finalist for the PEN-Winship Prize. Feitlowitz just finished a novel, Anna, Who Did Not Believe in the Sea. For the University of Texas Press, she is currently translating Salvador Novo's Estatua de Sal, an early 20th-century memoir followed by nineteen sonnets. Feitlowitz's work is profiled in the forthcoming ThreadNews.org. Her essays, art criticism and reporting, translations, interviews and OpEds can be found at bombsite.org; salon.com; crimesofwar.org; nytimes.com; pen.org, clarin.com.ar. She teaches literature and literary translation at Bennington College, in Bennington, VT. |
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Bonnie Friedman — Harper Perennial reissues an updated edition with a new preface to her first book, Writing Past Dark, an inspiring guide for all writers at all stages of their craft. Surrendering Oz, a memoir in essays published by the Etruscan Press, charts the emotional awakening of a bookish Bronx girl. From her early job as a proofreader at The Guinness Book of World Records, through an illicit liaison which threatens to destroy her marriage, Friedman charts a course of discovery that allows her finally to take charge of her life as a Texas professor, writer and wise student of her own soul. "Every woman who can read should read this book." — Abigail Thomas, Three Dog Night Click here to read about Bonnie weighing in on the Writing Past Dark reissue. Follow this link to read "The Book That Brought Writers’ Fears and Self-Doubt Into the Open" at Literary Hub. Click here to see Poets & Writers' "The New and Enduring Secrets of Writing Past Dark: A Q&A With Bonnie Friedman." |
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William E. Glassley — Based on his living in the Greenland wilderness for weeks at a time and isolated from the noise of the modern world, we can now enjoy reading A Wilder Time: Notes From a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice. How best to describe the mind of a scientist, the heart of a philosopher, and the soul of a poet... Check out Shelf-Awareness.com and NW Book Lovers. And follow this link to read an excerpt of A Wilder Time. |
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Judy Gold — How do you know when funny is funny? Can the political be funny? Find out when Dey Street publishes Yes I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians We Are All in Trouble. "Gold's defense of comedy, filled with great jokes and stories of censored comics, is a reminder that freedom of speech is no laughing matter." — Publishers Weekly Follow this link to see the website for the stand-up comedian and award winning writer. |
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Robin Hemley — Hemley is the founder and past president of the international nonfiction conference NonfictioNOW and is currently the Inaugural Director of The Polk School of Communications at Long Island University, Director of the MFA in Writing, Parsons Family Chair in Creative Writing and university professor, as well as Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa. Hemley has published 14 books of fiction and nonfiction and he is a Guggenheim and Rockefeller awardee. No need to travel; we can read his Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood just published by the University of Nebraska Press/ American Lives Series. Follow him on Twitter at Robinhemley. |
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Colin Hester — A Seattle-based novelist and Zen Buddhist. Hester's "Death and the Butterfly is a marvel, a magic trick, both a ballet on the tightwire of human strength and frailty and a fall into the darkest and deepest well. Colin Hester's achingly poignant sentences — this is an artist at the top of his power — balanced me breathlessly and held my hand as I fell. What his characters find in these most dark and private places — what we find — is one another. This is a story about Nazi bombs and grief-dumb road trips, of dying lovers and children. About senselessness, and sense. A story of how, paradoxically, our own most private grief is what connects us to everyone. It's a novel about poetry, too, and how common beauty and loss just might help us love, and love the world, again." — David Allan Cates, author of Tom Connor's Gift Follow this link to read an excerpt. Click here to see his essay in Poets and Writers. |
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Tom Kepler — When the luxury liner Ile de France sailed into New York harbor for the first time in 1927, she brought to America the first great, coordinated example of what the French then called L'Art Moderne. The revolutionary Art Deco interiors found on the Ile de France were unlike anything previously seen on the North Atlantic and set a standard in ocean liner décor for decades to come. Ile de France tells the incredible tale from start to finish. |
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Glenn Kurtz — Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), which was named a “Best Book of 2014” by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. On a summer vacation in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, Glenn's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, this brief home movie would become a memorial to an entire culture annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland documents Glenn's four-year search to identify the individuals in these haunting images. Kurtz's first book, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Knopf, 2007), was hailed by Newsday as "the book of a lifetime." He received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2016 and he is a 2019-2021 Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in Orange, California. "Three Minutes in Poland begins as the story of an old family film rediscovered and veers into an important tale of Polish shtetls during World War II. It is intensely moving and brilliantly researched, and it reads like a thriller." — Elie Wiesel Three Minutes - A Lengthening is directed and produced by Bianca Stigter and co-produced by Academy-Award-winning director Steve McQueen (Small Axe, 12 Years a Slave). It is narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. Super Ltd/Neon is working in conjunction with FSG to coordinate book availability. Kurtz will be in attendance at various 2022 film screenings including Sundance, Palm Springs, Warsaw, the Detroit Jewish Film festival and the Holocaust Museum. Follow this link to see the film trailer. |
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William J. Mann — From the noted Hollywood biographer and author of Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine & Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood comes the celebration of the great American love story—the romance between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, capturing its complexity, contradictions, and challenges as never before. In Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair, Mann offers a deep and comprehensive look at the unlikely love they shared. He paints a vivid portrait of their courtship and twelve-year marriage: the fights, the reconciliations, the children, the affairs, Bogie’s illness and Bacall’s steadfastness until his death. He offers a sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrait of Bacall’s life after Bogie, exploring her relationships with Frank Sinatra and Jason Robards, who would become her second husband, and the identity crisis she faced. Filled with thoughtful details and insights based on newly available records and correspondence, and illustrated with 35 photographs. William Mann’s brilliant biography of Marlon Brando, The Contender, the Hollywood legend illuminates this culture icon for a new age. Mann astutely argues that Brando was not only a great actor but also a cultural soothsayer, a Cassandra warning us about the challenges to come. Brando’s admonitions against the monetization of nearly every aspect of the culture were prescient. His public protests against racial segregation and discrimination at the height of the Civil Rights movement – getting himself arrested at least once – were criticized as being needlessly provocative. Yet those actions of fifty years ago have become a model many actors follow today. Follow this link to read Kirkus Reviews' "A complex, intimate, and illuminating inquiry into and defense of Brando." |
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Joseph Markulin — The name Machiavelli leaves a bad taste in your mouth — he is everybody's best bad guy, or is he? Joseph Markulin holds a PH.D. and is a defrocked professor of Italian and Comparative literature with a specialization in Medieval and Renaissance studies. He wrote in a professional capacity for over 25 years for corporations, PR agencies, law and consulting firms and the like. In addition to speech writing, annual reports and corporate histories, he has ghosted reams of articles and op-ed pieces that have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, etc. Machiavelli is published by Prometheus Books. |
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Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson — Partners in Passion: A Guide to Great Sex, Emotional Intimacy and Long-term Love draws on Michaels' and Johnson's long-time experience as collaborators, partners and spouses. The book is a comprehensive guide to creating a deep and fulfilling partnership. |
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Benjamin Miller — Echo Point Books publishes an updated reissue of Benjamin Miller's Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York — The Last Two Hundred Years. Miller offers his unique perspective on the riveting history of waste management in New York City. The urban, social, and political history of New York, explored through the lens of the city’s trash. Miller, the former director of policy planning for the Department of Sanitation, traces nearly two centuries of fascinating intrigue related to the city’s garbage contracts and sanitation policies. |
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Martin Moran — Spring 2016 brought the release of new and improved The Tricky Part and the publication of Moran's second memoir, All the Rage: A Quest. Every relationship is fraught with complexity; a landscape of anger and old wounds and difficult love, Moran muses. As his inquiry unfolds, he illuminates how rage can be the other side of compassion, how trauma can lead to forgiveness, and how, ultimately, all humanity is connected. Wishing Well Entertainment produced a documentary of The Tricky Part and it is making the film festival circuit. |
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Patti Niemi — Patti Niemi's memoir Sticking It Out, in which an 18 year-old drummer heads to Juilliard and struggles with competition, rejection, and crushing performance anxiety in order to win an audition for an orchestra and play percussion for a living. April 2016. ECW Press. NPR's Fresh Air: An Opera Percussionist Traces Her Path 'From Juilliard to the Orchestra Pit' Percussionist Patti Niemi on Good Day Rochester |
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Joe Okonkwo — Can you feel it? Can you feel the heat? Have you ever said read the movie, seen the book? Listen to the soundtrack Joe Okonkwo compiled for his stunning new collection, Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck, published by Amble Press. Of his first novel, David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife, called Jazz Moon "A passionate, alive, and original novel about love, race, and jazz in 1920s Harlem and Paris—a moving story of traveling far to find oneself." Jazz Moon won the Publishing Triangle's prestigious 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction. |
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Christopher Oldstone-Moore — Christopher Oldstone-Moore's Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair is as fascinating as it is fun to read. Some think a mane is to a lion as a beard is to a man; others say a smooth face wins the palm; a history of the tug-of-war between beards and the bald face, a story full of surprises about manliness, razors, and the power of gender and beards. January 2016. The University of Chicago Press. CBS News: The bearded men who've got social media buzzing "It's unlikely you'll take any beard — or mustache — at face value again." — Los Angeles Times |
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Margaret A. Oppenheimer — Born into grinding poverty, Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life Madame Jumel was one of the richest women in America with servants of her own and mansions in Manhattan and Saratoga Springs. During her remarkable life, she acquired a fortune from her first husband, a French merchant, and almost lost it to her second, the notorious vice president Aaron Burr. In The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage & Money in the Early Republic, Oppenheimer describes how after her death, while family members extolled her virtues, claimants to her estate painted a different picture: of a prostitute and the mother of George Washington's illegitimate son. Oppenheimer draws from archival documents and court filings, many untouched since the 1800s, to tell the true and full story of Eliza Jumel. |
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Charles Pappas — Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, withdraw money from an ATM, lick an ice-cream cone, switch on a computer, ride an escalator, play a DVR, watch a movie about dinosaurs, get fingerprinted, or pop a tranquilizer, you’re doing something that originated at a world’s fair or trade expo. His second book One Giant Leap celebrates NASA's 50th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing. Avid collector and cultural historian Pappas shows how the very idea of space force came to be. |
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Alison Pearlman — Alison is a Los Angeles-based art historian and cultural critic who writes about food and restaurant aesthetics. What do they tell us about the social lives and desires of food producers and consumers? She is the author of Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America (University of Chicago, 2013) and May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion (Agate, 2018). When not writing about food and restaurants in print or on her blog, The Eye in Dining, she teaches modern and contemporary art and design history at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. More information lives at alisonpearlman.com. |
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Russell Potter — Penguin Modern Classics follows up on Canongate's splendid publication of Pyg, the faux memoir based on the true story of Toby, an exceptional pig in late 18th century England who escapes the butcher's knife due in part to the steadfast companionship of his young guardian, the other hero of this book, Samuel Nicholson. Toby packs theaters and concert halls with his ability to count, spell and read the minds of ladies "only with their permission." Toby's sensitive and wise nature and his empathy for those around him make him come across as ironically more human than some of the humans he meets. It is as if Henry Fielding had thought of writing Babe. |
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Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma — In the Tamil-speaking world, The Kural: Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural is revered as a guide for how to practice compassion, goodness, and good sense in the nitty-gritty of daily life – from the life of the home, to the work of leaders, to the ways of love in our heart. Yet this masterpiece of world literature, on par with the Tao Te Ching and the poetry of Rumi, has long lacked translations that make its guidance, vision, and playfulness available to readers in English. “In the astonishingly fresh and vibrant translations that adorn this book, Tiruvalluvar’s voice can now reach the universal audience that so deeply needs its universal wisdom.” – Andrew Harvey, from the Foreword “This translation provides a refreshing remembrance and illustration (without the usual reprimands and dire warnings) of how to be a good steward of the planet and what it means to live a good life—a much-needed map of astonishingly humane guidance and care.” – Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders Pruiksma shares selected verses out loud and speaks about his translation, twenty years in the making, on his website, thomaspruiksma.com. |
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Kate Rounds — Mrs. Robinson, meet Holden Caulfield – that is if Holden were a smart, sexy teenage lesbian in love with her mother’s best friend. For Candace “Ace” Ragsdale, Mrs. Forest is an irresistible force of nature: luscious, tantalizing—and maybe not completely out of reach. The backdrop is the Massachusetts seaside town of Horton, cut off from the world. On the surface, boats sway on their moorings, while below bubbles a primal brew of salt and sea life—much like the Ragsdales, a decidedly modern family whose humor and goodwill skim breezily above an ocean of smoldering emotions. The Ragsdales aren’t moored to social convention—but they’ve learned to surf the wave of the unfamiliar and make the most of chaos. From Ace’s womanizing-yet-worshipful brother to her elusive-yet-loving parents, we watch this well-meaning family weave its way into a rich tapestry of townspeople, often to comic effect. Into this infinite chaos careens a rebel grandmother who shows up to help the Ragsdales save the town windmill, whose mysterious energy whips up the coastal disturbances of a changing world. As this spectacle of public conflict and private anguish unfolds, we’re fully on Ace’s side as she pilots the turbulent waters of love, sex, and traditional small-town values. Kate Rounds is a veteran journalist who grew up on the Massachusetts coast and lives in Jersey City without a cat. |
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Tom Santopietro — Applause publishes The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic on its 50th anniversary. Early next year, Audrey Hepburn: A Life in 63 Scenes, will be published. These books follow up on his bestselling The Sound of Music Story and Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters. Santopietro takes a 360-degree look at the Mockingbird phenomenon both on the page and screen. Here for the first time is the full behind the scenes story regarding the creation not just of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but also the Academy Award-winning 1962 film. His previous books, published with St. Martins Press and Harpers, include The New York Times Editor's Choice Considering Doris Day. Harper published |
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David J. Skal — Longtime monster/horror aficionado turns his studied gaze to Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Liveright/Norton publishes Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula in 2016. Skal's critically praised work includes Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (1990), followed by The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993). When the 4th World Dracula Congress meets in Dublin in October, David J. Skal is to be recognized with The Bernard Davies Award. The Award is for for his scholarship in the literary gothic genre incorporated into Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula |
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Matthew Spady — Longtime evangelist for Manhattan’s Audubon Park neighborhood, author Matthew Spady is the creator of the virtual walking tour AudubonParkNY.com and curator for AudubonParkPerspectives.org, a news site that reflects on the constant intersection of past and present in a vibrant and historic neighborhood. He was a leader in the decade-long community effort that culminated in the Audubon Park Historic District. Empire State Editions/Fordham University Press publishes The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It in Fall 2020. Follow this link to read a feature about Spady's book in The New York Times. |
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Robert Stefanotti — Wordbound Media re-releases Saint Agatha's Breast, the first installment of Magnificat trilogy. First published by St. Martin's under a pseudonym twenty-five years ago, the redesigned and edited book with true author attribution is perfect for these times: for years, the priests of San Redempto, a decrepit monastic order in the heart of Rome, were so busy indulging their private vices they failed to notice that thieves had been systematically plundering the monastery of its treasures. But when someone makes off with six paintings from a ghastly series of martyrdom studies executed by the 17th-century master Nicolas Poussin, the prior reluctantly orders the Rev. Brocard Curtis, the archivist of the order, to find the culprits. That fatal decree invites a maelstrom of violence that may finish off the dirty old monks and doom San Redempto to oblivion. |
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Joe Strike — We now know how Furry began because Furry Nation: The True Story of America’s Most Misunderstood Subculture, became the go-to furry book published by Cleis Press in 2018. Author Joe Strike appeared in the documentary series The Fandom. This summer Apollo Publishers releases Furry Planet: A World Gone Wild, Strike's immersive reentry into his world of furries and furry fandom. It celebrates this amazing subculture with a colorful look at the timeless human instinct to identify with animals, and a wealth of photos and illustrations showcasing fursuit, a resource list and furry art. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart — "Higher Than the Stars" Official Video |
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Jane Summer — In November 1979, an Air New Zealand 11-hour sightseeing flight carrying 257 people took off from Auckland to view the wonders of Antarctica including Mt. Erebus. When the flight was 90 minutes late in returning, the airline realized something had gone terribly wrong. Years later, through fate or coincidence, Summer is assigned to write a travel article about that same airline. The experience jars both her dreams and memories, resulting in Sibling Rivalry Press' Erebus, a documentary-style poetic exposé on a government's drive to hide what really happened. |
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Liz Swados — Every dog walker has a dark side...for an arterrorist, a gleefully misspent radical youth landed her in a federal prison; out on parole, she struggles as a dog walker and plots to reconcile with her abandoned (now Orthodox) daughter. Outstanding playwright and iconic New Yorker, Liz Swados packs heart and soul into her first novel Walking the Dog. What happens when everything you believed in and fought for in your youth goes up in smoke? Why are poodles so smart? A blend of Orange is the New Black and Patty Hearst, Walking the Dog is a delightful lovesong to NYC. June 2016. The Feminist Press. Sadly, Swados died in 2016. |
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Rick Whitaker — Come September we bid adieu to exquisite pandemic. Rick's publication ran the entire initial coronavirus outbreak in 2020 and 2021, providing reflection, stories, short film, poetry and peaceful reading for many. |
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