Cynthia Barrett — “Know any sailors? Are you a beachcomber? Land lover?? Three Sheets to the Wind: The Nautical Origins of Everyday Expressions, now in its eighth printing, is the perfect seafaring compendium. A natural Father’s Day or summer weekend away by the ocean gift. Barrett writes a regular column about the nautical origins of everyday expressions for Quarterdeck magazine. She lectures nationally on maritime language and its enduring influence on our everyday speech. Follow this link for a quick and easy lesson in all words nautical.
“Guaranteed to delight readers with the surprising nautical nuances of our language.” – Sail magazine
“Three Sheets to the Wind is addictively readable – just try to stop; it’s so hard!” – Shaye Areheart, Director of the Columbia Publishing Course.
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
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.
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?”
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.
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:
Kirkus Reviews
Literary Hub
Follow this link to read an excerpt in The Paris Review.
Click here to read a A spot-on LARB roundup of Mary Cappello’s glorious published work to date.
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.
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
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.”
— Dr. James Watson, author of The Double Helix
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
Patty Dann — Dann’s recent novel is The Wright Sister, about the Wright Brothers’ suffragette sister, Katharine. Dann is the author of The Butterfly Hours, which was chosen as one of the “Best Books for Writers” by Poets & Writers Magazine. Dann also wrote The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss, which received a Foreword Indie Gold Award for Family & Relationships, and The Baby Boat: A Memoir of Adoption.
Her first novel, Mermaids, was made into a movie, starring Cher, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci. Her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Dann has written three Modern Love columns for The New York Times and numerous Connections essays for The Boston Globe. New York Magazine named Dann one of the “Great Teachers of NYC.” She earned an MFA in writing from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Oregon. She has taught at the Fairfield County Writers’ Studio, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute and the West Side YMCA in NYC.
Forward.com: Why We Adored Patty Dann’s Butterfly Hours
Publishers Weekly: Best Books for Writers
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.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
“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.
Bonnie Friedman — Harper Perennial recently reissued an updated edition with a new preface to her bestselling first book, Writing Past Dark, named one of “The Essential Books for Writing” by The Center for Fiction and “One of the best books for writers” by Poets & Writers. It is an inspiring guide for all writers at all stages of their craft. Friedman is a MacDowell Fellow and three-time Notable Essayist in The Best American Essays, and her work has been selected for inclusion The Best American Movie Writing, The Best Writing on Writing, The Best of O., the Oprah Magazine, and The Best Buddhist Writing. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop in fiction-writing, she was selected for a fellowship in fiction-writing at the Provincetown Fine Arts Center and has taught creative nonfiction writing at Dartmouth College and New York University. She is a professor emeritus at The University of North Texas.
Early next year Europa Publications publishes Don’t Stop, Friedmman’s first novel.
“In this daring, compelling novel, we are invited into the world of Ina, a 39-year-old woman embarking on a journey of self-discovery and awakening. Don’t Stop elegantly uncovers the concealed dimensions of desire. It is luminous, evocative, and original.”
— Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling novelist
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.”
Jason Friedman — Friedman takes the reader on a personal journey through generations of an aristocratic Jewish family as they escaped persecution in the Old World and rose from shopkeepers to success in business, politics, and high society—and met tragedy in war. Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War by San Francisco-based Friedman is recently published by the University of South Carolina Press. His work has appeared in the New York Times, South Carolina Review, Tablet, San Francisco Chronicle, Gettysburg Review, Image, Mission at Tenth, Jonathan, Fjords Review, Cimarron Review, Decadent Review, and Literary Hub. Friedman’s book Fire Year won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award. His work is included in Best American Gay Fiction, The Queer South, and the cultural studies reader Goth. He published two children’s books, Phantom Trucker and Haunted Houses.
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…
“Glassley exhibits an uncanny ability to put us in the midst of Greenland’s vast silence, where he takes us deep into the planet’s soul. It is an important and well-told adventure that opens us to life’s grand expanse and begs us to follow in spite of the brevity of our existence.” — John Francis, author of Planetwalker and The Ragged Edge of Silence.
“Profound and moving. … A superb tool for a better understanding of the natural world and why real science matters.” — Kirkus Reviews (**** review)
“Poetic, enthusiastic. … Combining the strengths of travel writing and lyrical memoir, Glassley translates his own ‘incandescent experience of place’ into a conservation message: ‘We must share and celebrate the wild so that it might be saved.'” — Foreword Reviews (*** review)
Check out Shelf-Awareness.com and NW Book Lovers. And follow this link to read an excerpt of A Wilder Time.
In March 2023, Bill Glassley died on his way to Greenland to do additional research on his unpublished FIELDWORK. » Read more
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.
Julian Hattem — Hattem’s on-the-ground reporting from the front lines of climate change reveals how the world has entered a new era of global migration. People have always moved from one place to another to seek out a better life—including, at times, a better climate—but the scale and pace of current climate migration could fundamentally reshape our human geography. This migration is not theoretical—it is already happening right now. In places such as Bangladesh, Guatemala, and the United States, Shelter from the Storm gives a human face to some of the millions of climate migrants leaving their homes and the millions more who will follow in coming years. Shelter from the Storm is to be published by the New Press in 2025.
Julian Hattem is a journalist, analyst, and researcher with more than a decade of experience covering migration, politics, and climate change from four continents. He is the editor of the online magazine of the Migration Policy Institute, a major think tank, where he writes a bimonthly newsletter with approximately 25,000 subscribers and hosts the world’s leading podcast on climate change and migration. He was on staff with the Associated Press and The Hill, has written for outlets including The Washington Post, The Guardian, NPR, and The Atlantic, and has received journalism fellowships from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and International Reporting Project.
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.
Anna Farro Henderson — Henderson is a Canadian American scientist, writer and author of Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood. She was an environmental policy adviser to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton and is now a fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, working in climate advocacy, and an instructor at the Loft Literary Center. She lives with her family in Minnesota, where she makes daily visits to the Mississippi River.
Portions of some of these essays have been published, sometimes in different forms, in the following publications: The Rumpus, Kenyon ReviewSeneca Review, Water~Stone Review, Cleaver Magazine, No Contact, Identity Theory and Raritan Quarterly.
“This is a remarkably honest book — and therefore funny, moving, and eminently worth reading. Anna Farro Henderson’s deep encounters with Big Science and Big Bureaucracy will help you understand why progress on matters of life and death can be so maddeningly slow; her encounters with herself may help you figure out how to live your own life.” – Bill McKibben
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.
Elizabeth Kendall — is a dance and culture critic/historian and a professor of Literary Studies at Lang College and NSSR, both of New School. Her book Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer, was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press; Oxford paperback 2015. Previous titles include: Where She Danced, (Knopf & U. of California Press); The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the l930’s (Knopf & Cooper Square Press), two memoirs, American Daughter (Random House), Autobiography of a Wardrobe (Pantheon and Anchor/Doubleday), and numerous articles about dance, fashion and movies. She received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Guggenheim Foundation, Cullman Center, Fond Likhacheva, and Leon Levy Center for Biography. Kendall is proud to sit most summers at Desk #7 in the Slavic Division of the National Library of Finland. Balanchine Finds His America: A Tale of Love Lost & Ballet Reborn is to be published by Oxford University Press in 2025. » Read more
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.
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.
In 2025, Dan Simon/7Stories is set to publish Glenn Kurtz’s Men at Work: Lewis W. Hine and the Men Who Built the Empire State Building. A masterful, cultural history of the workers who built the Empire State Building, revealing the identities of the men who appear in Hine’s iconic photographs
William J. Mann — Author of ten books, including his most recent, Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime for Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, and the Lambda Literary Award for Biography for Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines. He is also the author of The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando (Follow this link to read Kirkus Reviews’ “A complex, intimate, and illuminating inquiry into and defense of Brando.”) and Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. He’s written for Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and many other publications. He’s appeared on CNN, Turner Movie Classics, the BBC, NPR, and numerous documentary series and films, including Scotty: The Secret History of Hollywood. His New York Times bestsellers include his books on Hepburn and Brando; How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood; Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand; and Tinseltown. Simon and Schuster is scheduled to publish his deeply researched account of the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, known in popular culture as “The Black Dahlia” with supplemental and additional materials. An Assistant Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, Mann lectures on Hollywood and LGBTQ history. He lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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.
Elizabeth MeLampy — McLampy asks what makes a human different from an animal? Humans triangulate who we are—and what makes us special—through our relationship with animals. Throughout history, and today at hundreds of animal festivals around the world every year, humans have put members of the animal kingdom on display to gawk at, demonize, or adore. But why? What value do these carnivals and their rituals hold, and why when the animals are in distress do we insist so intently that the show still must go on? Read more at MeLampy’s Being Animal Substack,
In Carnival: How We Use Animals to Celebrate Ourselves, esteemed animal welfare lawyer MeLampy attends eight quintessential animal festivals and meets the groundhogs, butterflies, rattlesnakes, lobsters, sled dogs, and other creatures we use to build community, cause fear, and transmit meaning. In the process she raises profound questions of why our human impulse is to dominate, and if in today’s enlightened age we might finally find the compassion to craft a new path, one that frees animals from suffering for the sake of telling our stories.
MeLampy is a lawyer with experience in animal rights and protection. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, she was named an Emerging Scholar Fellow by the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy in 2020 and received an award for her work with Harvard Law’s Animal Law & Policy Program in 2021. She has interned with organizations like the PETA Foundation, Animal Outlook, and the Conservation Law Foundation, and clerked for judges in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the Federal District Court in Arizona. She currently works as an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and lives in Washington, DC.
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.
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.
David Morris — Morris reminds us that Central Park was built during a period of crisis: immediately before, during, and after the Civil War. Today — a peaceful oasis amid the turmoil of New York City — it receives over 42 million visitors each year.
A Guggenheim scholar and PEN award-winning writer, David Morris returns to the city of his birth after a lifetime of wandering, where he meditates on the magical park he sees from his window. His thoughts turn to Frederick Law Olmsted, a bankrupt gentleman-farmer turned travel writer with zero training in landscape design, who with his improbable London-born partner Calvert Vaux manages to create an iconic American artwork. Amid the current crisis of global climate change, Ten Thousand Central Parks: An Anthropocene Parable offers a parable of radical hope, thinking big, and seizing opportunities.
Interdisciplinary and inventive, Morris is the author of a pioneering biocultural trilogy: The Culture of Pain (1991), Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998), and Eros and Illness (2017). Among the “giants” of pain medicine, as a recent book describes him, he is also well known in eighteenth-century studies. (Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense [1985] won the annual C18 prize for best book.) Earth Warrior (1995), Civil War Duet (2019), and Wanderers (2022) illustrate his work in narrative nonfiction, while Fordham University Press is scheduled to publish Ten Thousand Central Parks in 2026.
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
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.
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
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.
Follow this link to read stellar reviews.
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.
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.
Amy Pence — Pence’s book Yellow combines non-fiction with a speculative inception and branches from a young girl’s encounter with the intelligent slime mould (Physarum Polycephalum) the year of its discovery in 1973. Integrating real events—the launch of Skylab, details from Watergate, UFO sightings, and the legacy of Vietnam on Americans—the novel charts performance artist Z’s life and weaves fact, physics, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience. Her fiction has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Juked. She was awarded a Gil Dennis Memorial Scholarship from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her hybrid book on Emily Dickinson — [It] Incandescent — (Ninebark, 2018) won the international Eyelands Poetry Award in Athens, Greece. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she’s a part-time tutor in Atlanta and has taught poetry at Emory and in other workshop settings.
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.
Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma — In the Tamil-speaking world, The Kural: Thiruvalluvar’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.
“To translate even a single kural couplet, bewitching in its rhythm and packed with meaning, is a formidable task. But we now have Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma’s translation, without doubt the best ever into English.”—David Shulman, The New York Review of Books
“This translation provides a refreshing remembrance and illustration . . . 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 WondersPruiksma has offered keynote speeches about his translation, twenty years in the making, in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Toronto, New York, DC, and Chicago, and shares selected verses out loud on his website, thomaspruiksma.com.
Oliver Radclyffe — Radclyffe refused to constrain himself to reductive labels. He is in the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complexities of transition, examining the places where sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, romantic desire, family history and gender identity overlap. Throughout his journey, Radclyffe challenges and questions every step he takes, clarifying and de-stigmatizing the process of transition in a memoir that is vivid, funny, devastating and smart. He inspires and enlightens readers with his engaging and distinctive voice. Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic is to publish Frighten the Horses, a memoir of compassion, sacrifice and redemption in the fall 2024.
Radclyffe lives on the Connecticut coast raising his four children.
His monograph, Adult Human Male, was published by Unbound Edition Press in 2023.
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.
Tom Santopietro — Tom’s upcoming family-approved biography of Audrey Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn: A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty, will be published in the spring of 2025. His most recent book, The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic was published in 2023 to coincide with that film’s 50th anniversary. These books follow up on Why To Kill A Mockingbird Matters, The Godfather Effect, Sinatra in Hollywood, The Importance of Being Barbra, and his national bestselling The Sound of Music Story. His previous books, published with St. Martins Press and HarperCollins, include The New York Times Editor’s Choice Considering Doris Day and Barbara Cook’s memoir Then and Now. Most recently, Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey by Bob Avian, written with Tom, was chosen by National Public Radio as a Best Book of the Year. His first play JBKO will be produced in the summer of 2024.
David J. Skal — Longtime monster/horror client, friend and aficionado died tragically on January 1, 2024. » Read more
In his last book, Something in the Blood, Skal turned his gaze to Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Liveright/Norton published 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 his scholarship in the literary gothic genre incorporated into Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula.
Upon publication, two excerpts appeared in The Paris Review: Part One | Part Two
Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula
There is Still No Better or More Important Dracula Than the Original, Bela Lugosi
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Margaret Vandenburg — Vandenburg is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose most recent novel, Craze, ventures into the clandestine worlds of speakeasies and drag balls, catalyzes the raucous eroticism of the Roaring Twenties. Vandenburg’s previous novels include The Home Front, a portrait of a family facing autism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, an Iraq War requiem, and An American in Paris, a historical romp through the sapphic salons in the Roaring Twenties. Her plays include Belly of the Beast, a finalist for the Drama League Award for Outstanding Digital Theater, and Roe v. Wade 2.0, the centerpiece of a theater-based reproductive rights coalition. Having completed her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Vandenburg spent her academic career as a Senior Lecturer at Barnard College, specializing in modernism, postmodernism, and gender studies.
Follow these links to read The New York Times review of The Home Front and the Publishers Weekly review of An American in Paris, the prequel to Craze.
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.
Whitaker is author of Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling and The First Time I Met Frank O’Hara: Reading Gay American Writers. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in the New York Times, the New York Observer, Salon, Washington Post, Village Voice, Ballet Review, Dance, The Quarterly and Noon. An Honest Ghost, Whitaker’s first semi-autobiographical novel is a collage narrative and consists entirely of discrete sentences taken as found in other books and attributed to their source.
Elegant Fathers & Sons, an homage to David Markson published in Berfrois.